


symbolic acts, so vivid

by pvnish



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: Gen, Other, Pre-Canon, Pre-Klok, financial insecurity, nonlinear chapters, trans pickles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2020-12-16 01:35:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21028112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pvnish/pseuds/pvnish
Summary: The Mordhaus before Mordhaus; and the times even before that.A shitty two-bedroom apartment divided up unevenly between five sweaty dudes with attitude problems, all steel-toeing the line between threadbare tolerance and codependency. When you’re strapped for cash, you play a game of battle royale between your needs and the desire to have a good time.





	1. sun is setting cool again

**Author's Note:**

> no cohesive plot for this series. timeline will jump around. mixed bag of pairing combos are inevitable. i don’t phoneticize pickles’ accent or murderface’s lisp, i apologize 
> 
> call this a romanticization of financial duress, but i wrote this while i wasn’t sure if i was gonna be able to pay my rent

One hundred black and white single-sided copies of their show flyer runs eight dollars at the print shop by the Radio Hut, which is eight dollars Nathan isn’t willing to spend. That’s eight bucks that could be spent on better things, like food. Or beer, or a few VHS tapes at the rental place with the bad carpet. None of these move the band’s career forward an inch, but they’re all more instantly gratifying. Sometimes it all boils down to motivation alone. 

So he drags Murderface ten blocks across town in the miserable heavy Florida heat to the public library, where they commandeer a copier, each using their library cards for the allotted seventy free copies each. Murderface keeps the stacks shoved into a beat up backpack, the corners getting fucked up and dog-eared but it doesn’t matter because the flyers only have to survive being stapled to telephone poles until the end of the week. The drawings on their flyer are a collaborative effort by Murderface and Nathan, a couple of notebook paper doodles traced heavy-handed onto plain paper with a ballpoint pen. There’s a shattered skull with bacon-like shreds of flesh still clinging on, a clock showing a minute to midnight clutched in its gnarled teeth. The bottom of the flyer is framed by crossed battle axes, dripping blood and adorned in spikes. The lettering is all done by Pickles, the only one among them with passable spelling skills.

They trudge down the library steps, Murderface bitching about his feet hurting while Nathan looks up at the sky. It’s sickly bruise-grey overhead and darkening ominously at the horizon. The trees in the park hiss and shudder in the wind and Nathan knows it’s about to dump hard. Their apartment is thirteen blocks back the other direction and he’s not sure if they’ll beat the rain or not. Cell phones are distant fantasies for when their paychecks start sprouting more zeroes - calling Pickles to come collect them is an impossibility. That, and nobody wants to waste the gas. Gasoline usage is typically reserved for special occasions. 

The two of them walk home, Nathan in near silence and Murderface occasionally grunting or running his mouth. Both of them are tired, and hungry, and the boots Murderface got from the military surplus store don’t fit him properly and he won’t stop saying so until the whole world knows. 

“I almost enlisted, you know,” Murderface says, and Nathan already knows but he lets him ramble regardless. He was practically there when Murderface first got the bright idea in sophomore year. “But the Marines wouldn’t take me. They don’t know what they’re missing.” He trails off, muttering about a criminal record and his family history. 

Nathan knows Murderface couldn’t pass the physical requirements, but he also knows not to jam his fingers into that wound. Maybe another time, but his mood isn’t sour enough and they’ve got nine blocks to go until they’re home. Instead, he opts for conversation. “Me too,” he grunts, not explaining further. 

“Why didn’t you? _You’d_ pass the physical.” Murderface gestures to himself in comparison to Nathan. He’s a foot shorter, skin stretched over bones, spine bent slightly by scoliosis and cranial bones structured wider than most people’s. Nathan, meanwhile - a former linebacker with stamina and wide shoulders, looking like his war face would make Gunnery Sergeant Hartman shit his pants... And that’s before the war cry.

Nathan can smell that he’s gearing up for a tangent in tearing himself down, and cuts him off at the pass. “Didn’t graduate, remember,” he explains. You need a diploma for the military, and he didn’t even have a GED. Had no interest in trying for it, even though his mom offered to pay for his classes and the test. He knows how it makes her feel, that he consistently missed every milestone set before him. Not speaking, not making friends, not succeeding or thriving in school, not graduating. His dad takes it harder, having been a military man from a long line of military men... And then here’s Nathan, ending the jarhead tradition by lacking direction, refusing to apply himself and fighting away haircuts until the jet black ends reached his shoulders. Worse yet, he paints his nails black. Rose and Oscar aren’t mad and aren’t disappointed, they’re  _ concerned _ . 

Lightning flashes in the distance and Nathan can smell the ozone that Murderface’s nose is too broken to detect. He doesn’t say it, and neither does William, but both of them felt pulled elsewhere, far away from respectable haircuts and real jobs. Towards record stores that sold to unattended minors no matter what Tipper Gore said, towards pawn shops with guitars in the window, towards musty garages and a shitty apartment with a mold problem and barred windows. His black hair is glued to his forehead in sweaty strings and he can feel his t-shirt clinging to his lower back in a disgusting way, and he’s not sure if his crumpled presidents will feed his band until they get paid at their next gig. He’s not sure if their next gig will even pay or if it’ll be beer tickets or exposure. But he’d rather be doing this than anything else. Literally anything else. His manifest destiny, or something. 

The sky suddenly vomits on them only four blocks from Mordhaus, the rain slapping down on the pavement all at once in a coordinated effort. The pair hunches their shoulders over and Murderface twists his backpack around in front to try and shield it from the rain soaking through. Nathan thinks about hurrying, since he can see their building in the distance, but he’d outpace his bassist and didn’t want to hear him whine about it. 

Just as they reach the second floor, hail rattles down noisily on the sheet metal awning overhead, drowning out Nathan beating on the apartment door with one fist. With only two house keys between the entire band (the landlord only allowed three to be distributed, and no one had been willing to pay the fifty dollar fee to replace the lost third), they had to rotate and rely on each other for entry. Nathan and Pickles shared one, and today it was left to Pickles. His car was out front, a scraped monstrosity with spray painted flames and no functional air conditioning, so he was very likely home. They only had to hope he was actually awake. 

In the middle of Nathan booming out Pickles’ name, the door cracks open and is jerked still by the chain lock. Nathan stops shouting, and the door slams back shut again. He can’t hear the chain being scrabbled free of the lock, but he can tell Pickles has just woken up because it takes a moment for the door to come fully open, this time revealing Pickles’ pale white body interrupted only by white y-front briefs and one black sock. Nathan immediately detects the smell of chicken. 

“Heyyyyyy,” Pickles drawls, ushering them both in. Murderface dumps his backpack by the door and collapses on the couch to pry his boots off. The second his mouth opens to complain, Pickles cuts him off. “I went to the supermarket with the fancy new self-checkout, you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to steal from there.” 

Nathan follows Pickles’ freckly point to the kitchen counter, with three plastic rotisserie chicken containers lined up in a row. Other assorted groceries accompany them, including a birthday cake covered in pink and purple icing, a sugar-paper Barbie on the front saying  _ Happy 6th Brithday Jenny _ . On the plastic hovering over Barbie’s blue eyeshadow is a yellow sticker with red letters declaring it’s discounted for a misprint. Nathan can’t tell what’s wrong with it. Maybe Barbie is the wrong color? He doesn’t pay attention to Barbie. “How’d you do it?”

The unspoken question is,  _ how much did all this cost? _ Their success is fluid, paychecks depending on how many hours each of them can get at abysmal part time jobs and how much their gigs pay, if at all. Then there’s the question of personal responsibility and the ever-present fixation on instant gratification. A constant battle wages between having a good time and making sure the ends at least brush up against each other. Almost invariably, the good times win, consequently breeding bad times digging for change and prowling food banks. 

“Twelve dollars,” brags Pickles, snatching the receipt from the countertop. Nathan isn’t sure how he always manages to answer the question he’s trying to dodge asking. Pickles pats the receipt onto the middle of Nathan’s chest, then sets to swatting Murderface away from the sweaty chicken containers, insisting it’s for a dinner they can’t have until their guitarists get home. 

Nathan peels the receipt away from his damp tank top, and squints to interpret. There are only four items listed - three chickens and the cake. The receipt indicates a coupon was applied to the chickens. He looks up from the receipt and scans the counter for what hasn’t been put up yet. Various boxes of instant pudding and jello, cookies, two loaves of bread, a brownie mix, bags of cereal with cartoon characters printed on the front. Pickles begins putting them away in the cabinets, and Murderface cracks the fridge open. His face lights up, making up for the fact that the light bulb inside has been out for a few weeks. Two gallons of milk, packs of bacon and lunch meat, and then rows on rows of beer bottles. More occupy the door of the fridge, clinking together in the condiment rack alongside condiment bottles stolen from diners. Murderface immediately helps himself to two of them, cracking the tops off with the gap in his teeth and chugging both in one hand. Beer dribbles down his chin and mixes with rainwater soaked into his shirt.

Pickles puts his hands on his skinny hips triumphantly, viewing his heist. “All’s you do is you don’t scan stuff or put it on the scale right,” he explains. “You leave with a buncha people so nobody checks your receipt.” Again, unspoken -  _ we have to be careful and can’t do this every time _ . “And the liquor store had a sale on beer.” Pickles was the most money conscious of them, having been intimately familiar with similar (and arguably worse) circumstances for longer. 

Nathan wonders sometimes if it bothers Pickles to have gone from the success of Snakes n’ Barrels to... This. Clipping coupons, barely making rent, and working part time at a gas station. If it does bother him, he never says anything. Nathan never pries. 

Murderface shoves his now-empty bottles into the overstuffed trash can, leaving the caps on the countertop with a random selection of its family. “You got any money left after that?” he asks, always willing to disregard their reluctance to discuss money in plain terms. While Nathan behaves as though not talking about it prevents it from becoming real, William chooses to rip the bandaid right off and see how red the numbers are. 

Unbothered, Pickles makes a nasal whine as he thinks. He retreats into one of the two bedrooms and comes out wearing his pants and holding his wallet, dipping a finger in to count the bills. “Twenty-two,” he says.

Nathan dimly recollects that it should be more, but he’s not sure by how much, and not even Murderface will go as far as asking how much Pickles spends on drugs and alcohol. It doesn’t matter. Whenever they get down to desperation, one of them always comes up with just enough to pull them through and carry them just a little longer. “I got twelve bucks,” Nathan offers. 

The two of them look at Murderface. Murderface looks back, then realizes why he’s being looked at. He looks at the floor. He’s willing to cut to the quick of everyone else’s financial matters, but the same doesn’t hold true for his own. 

“Well,” Nathan says. 

“Well,” Murderface says. 

“Cmon,” Pickles says. “It’s okay if you got nothin.” His tone is genuine. Every member of the band has turned out empty pockets before - Murderface is not special. 

His pride too sensitive to accept that his friends think he has nothing, Murderface shoves his calloused hands into his soaking cargo shorts and comes out with a handful of damp bills. “Six,” he counts, then dips back in for the coins. It takes longer to count these with a stubby bitten finger, spreading and grouping them in the palm of his hand. “Six sixty-three.” His lisp menaces the words. 

Nathan grunts an “Aw man,” and Pickles hastily rifles in his own pockets and hands Murderface three more pennies. 

“Nice,” Nathan says. 

“Nice,” Murderface echoes, now able to feel a sense of pride in being miserably broke. Not that it matters, ultimately. Gig money is divided equally among them, and they each keep their own paychecks; fair is fair after all. But at the end of each month, it all gets pooled into a collective anyway. They all have the same bills to pay to keep the same fridge stocked and the same roof over their heads. What happens between the second and the twenty-ninth days of the month is just filler and chasing whatever good time they can afford. 

Pickles tosses the plastic grocery bags into an empty paint bucket kept underneath the sink, full of other plastic bag brethren. “You guys oughta get changed,” he nags. “You’re gonna get the flu or get the couch moldy or something.” He chases them out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, where he stands in the doorway while Nathan and Murderface knock together awkwardly in the tiny room and peel down to their underwear, draping their wet garments over the towel rack and shower curtain rod to drip-dry. Only then does Pickles allow them out of this tile prison, leaving them to re-dress themselves without supervision. 

They share a bedroom, with Murderface sleeping in a pile of pillows and blankets (Goodwill finds and stolen from various parties the band attended) tucked in the walk-in closet. His limited belongings pile the built-in shelves, giving him his own space of what little real estate they have at their disposal. The small space is claustrophobic but comforting - good for sleep, and little else. Nathan sleeps in the bedroom itself, his own clothes semi-organized into piles on the floor next to a sheetless mattress raised up on wooden palettes. While Murderface stumbles and thuds around the closet, Nathan blindly selects probably-clean clothes and tugs them on.

As he exits the bedroom, Magnus slithers in the front door almost silently. Nathan pauses in the bedroom door, nodding in greeting and withholding from speaking until he determines what flavor of unpredictable mood their rhythm guitarist is in. By now, the dance around outbursts is routine.

Pickles, boiling elbow macaroni on the stove, looks over his shoulder and waves with the spoon he’s stirring with. He starts a greeting, reedy and tinged with the kind of friendliness reserved for when you can’t decide if you hate someone or not, but you’re pretty sure you don’t want them to figure out which it is before you do.

Magnus cuts him off at the pass, eyes instantly landing on the plastic containers still separating the front room from the tiny kitchen. “How much did all that cost,” he says, not asks. The statement isn’t a full-fledged accusation, but it’s clear it could bud into an argument at any moment. He occupies a liminal space, always impossible to please and wanting unworkable combinations of outcomes. Nathan knows he will be angry if the food is stolen, and angry if they came by it honestly. They could be banned from a store, they’re jeopardizing the band, they’re risking law enforcement contact. He thinks it wouldn’t be so irritating if the guy wasn’t a hypocrite - lying about how much he had, occasionally refusing to pay his own share, and certainly not being above any combination of lying, cheating and/or stealing. Hammersmith was no stranger to the local police - there’s a reason why there were now only two cars parked outside their apartment.

Nathan glances at their drummer. Like defusing a bomb, Pickles grins and sips the beer he’s got in his non-pasta hand. “Me n’ Nathan n’ Murderface pooled together,” he explains. “And you know how I am about those coupons.”

The answer is passable. Magnus steps fully into the apartment now, closing the door behind him as a growl of thunder shakes the building. He chooses to remain silent, darkening the couch with his presence and propping his feet up on one of the band’s amps. He stays silent, arms crossed over his chest. 

Nathan notices then that he’s completely dry. None of them own an umbrella, which is a ridiculous purchase for a group of people so broke that they often tape a single quarter to a coffee stir to jig in coin slots at the laundromat. He wonders which apartment their rhythm guitarist was in, and what he was doing. Buying or selling drugs, most likely - Nathan isn’t sure yet why Pickles doesn’t bother him, but Magnus rubs him so backward. Looking at the rotisserie chickens on the faux-marble counter, he can’t remember the last time Magnus did something like this. He buys no food but partakes in what is bought, he bums drugs and cigarettes and booze from others but doesn’t share his own. When the rent doesn’t add up at the end of the month, or when the gas tanks are ticking down to empty, it’s never Magnus that pulls through for them. Even Murderface, half-feral and lazy at his part time janitorial job, scraps together more. Yet Magnus is the first to bark at the others for spending too much. 

He feels like an asshole for thinking it. If asked, it’s not like he could pull up any evidence, and he knows fully that they’ve all done their fair share of unfair treatment towards Magnus. Besides, where would they ever get another rhythm guitarist, skilled enough to keep up and patient enough to put up with their empty wallets and bad attitudes? It’s not like they grew on trees, or were stowaways on cargo ships headed for Tampa-tumor towns like this one. 

Murderface nudges at Nathan’s elbow on the way past, dressed in warm, dry thrift store pickings. Nathan knows the home he came from - has known Murderface since he and his grandparents moved here from Texas. They’d gone to high school together before Nathan got sick of it and decided to drop out. He’d only been to their trailer once, and saw immediately why William had picked up an uncanny ability to make himself scarce at the right moments. He saw it on the Discovery channel or Animal Planet one time; a survival instinct, he thinks it’s called. Defense mechanism? It’s one of the two. Nathan was no psychologist, but he figures most of Murderface’s behavior would fit into one of those categories.

He stays at the opening of the hallway, watching as Murderface shreds open a packet of powdered instant cheese, combining it into the pasta Pickles has made. Now with an assistant, Pickles turns away to assess the dishes piled up in the sink. The corner of his mouth stretches back over his teeth, cringing at some of the dried-on residues. This is another impending argument, but not so dreaded as the others. This one is predictable, with a clear fix. 

Something traces along Nathan’s shoulder blade, perfectly following the curve. He grunts, huge fist tightening and ready to swing. The unknown force he rounds on is just Skwisgaar, home the whole time - holed up in his own room either asleep or practicing guitar. Possibly both. Nathan wishes the rest of them were that dedicated to their practice. Judging by his bleary eyes and the way his hair has yet to be perfectly arranged, it looks like sleep. 

The blond’s long fingers comb through his wavy hair, looking more put together already. He doesn’t move from his spot, slightly behind Nathan and looking out into the living room. He takes long breaths, like he’s still deep asleep, inhaling the smells of their apartment. Cigarette smoke, and the alcohol soaked into the carpets, and the stolen cologne they use to try and mask those scents, and spray paint. And now, chicken and herbs and imitation cheese. “Smells chicken,” he observes. 

Nathan nods, inclining his head towards the birds. “We were waiting on you to get home, but. You’re here. Already.” 

“Ja,” Skwisgaar says. “Didnt’s feel to goes out today.” 

He leans around Nathan to act as though he’s looking out the front window, but the band has hung red curtains up and clipped them together to prevent outside light from leaking in. Still, just barely, lightning splinters through. In the dim, Nathan notices Skwisgaar noticing that Magnus’ Cuban heels are propped on the nicest amp in the room. Not the mystery fourth-hand graffitied amp that belongs to Murderface, nor the one covered in thrash metal band stickers that belongs to Magnus himself. Skwisgaar’s amp. The two guitarists make eye contact and lightning flashes again, inside the apartment, invisible but tangible. Nathan doesn’t budge, and he can see Pickles and Murderface both shift as they look over their shoulders and at each other. 

And then, all at once - Pickles stirs the Kraft with an obscene noise, and Skwisgaar ambles gracefully into the kitchen, and all the beer bottles in the fridge chime against one another as Murderface opens the fridge, and Nathan’s stomach growls. The ozone smell leaves the air and the string doesn’t snap this time. 

Their drummer serves dinner in paper bowls with plastic forks, and Magnus does not put his feet back up on Skiwsgaar’s amp when they sit down to eat. Practice was one thing, but eating together as a collective was rare. A number of planets had to align; schedules and finances, for one thing, but their moods were just as big a factor. With no tension tonight, a debate instead arises over which VHS to put on for the night. 

Some of their tapes are stolen from house parties, others came from Nathan’s parents or from the Blockbuster they aren’t allowed in anymore. Others are terrible recordings of movies aired on stolen cable, marked in misspelled sharpie (and featuring star ratings). Most are horror movies, but the odd comedy comes into rotation occasionally. 

As soon as Murderface’s scraped fingers shoot towards one tape in particular, Nathan growls behind him, “Not Tremors again.”

“You musta made us see it a hundred times already,” Pickles agrees. “What about, eh...Nightbreed? I haven’t seen it.”

Skwisgaar shakes his head. “Just watches it with Murderface, nights befores yestersday nights.” 

“Fuck you guys, then,” Pickles says noncommitally, slipping it back into the paper sleeve and continuing the search. “What about Misery?”

“I don’t care,” Magnus groans, impatient and caring enough to announce he doesn’t care. “Pick already. Haven’t got all night.”

“Like you have plans,” Nathan grunts back. accepting Misery from Pickles and getting it running with a few mild slaps to the top of the VCR, like burping a plastic baby. There’s no sourness in his tone, and Magnus doesn’t search for a fight. The singer lets the movie roll, bringing another armload of beer bottles from the kitchen and passing them out to his friends. He cuts the lights. Thunder shakes their building as he sits down and settles in. 

Later, barely visible in the warm flickering light of the television, Murderface sits on the floor and eats his portion of stale sheet cake with his hands. The icing stains them blue, because he demanded to be the one to eat Barbie’s eyes. On screen, Annie Wilkes hoists a sledgehammer. Beside him, legs stretched out on the floor before him, Skwisgaar watches through his fingers. 

“This is gonna be us someday,” William declares, looking up over his shoulder. He leans back against the couch, Nathan’s shin against his left side and Magnus’ to his right.

Nathan grunts with a question mark on the end, arms crossed comfortably across his wide linebacker chest and Pickles leaning against his bicep. 

“You better not get cake on my shoes,” Magnus mutters under his breath, dozing too far to provide a genuine threat. 

As Annie breaks Paul’s second ankle, Pickles tilts his head. “Us with the sledgehammer?” 

“No, no — well, maybe,” Murderface waves his hand, coming nowhere near Magnus but regardless causing him to rearrange his bony legs. “But us, with the fucking psycho fans begging us for more. Doing all kinds of crazy shit for it.” The way he turns his head, it’s too dark to see any of his facial features, just the angle of his gaunt cheekbone flickering as the author in the movie howls in pain. 

“God, I hope so,” Pickles humors him. “Gonna be so stinkin rich, we can... Pay bills and buy all the beer we want. The good kind, even.” He sticks one leg out straight, knocking over an empty bottle and startling the Swede. Pickles dissolves into snickers, earning him a sharp elbow to the calf. 

Nathan blinks slowly as the movie rolls on, but eventually he nods. “Yeah,” he growls. “That’s gonna be us.” The silence drags on, and he tilts his head, one long strand of hair falling across his vision. “But if anyone tries to fuck with us, we’ll... uh, have them killed. On the spot.”

“Get real,” Magnus sneers, rolling his eyes up into the back of his head. 

Murderface was always saying Magnus would sometimes get ‘serial killer eyes’, which he was never able to explain very well. It gave him a wild look, like a cornered cat. When Nathan looks at him now, he has that serial killer look on his face, but all he does is watch the movie with his hands folded behind his head. 

Nathan turns back to the screen as well, choosing not to bother and instead grateful for a night with no real bickering. No stressing about every last dime or if they all ate enough, either, at least for another few days. 

Before the end of the movie, he dozes off. 


	2. watch out, i’m young and lethal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sloppy birth of a band with a bad name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops, that took a second 
> 
> jumping back a little further. this one’s based off of tidbits in that old revolver interview, and murderface’s line that he’s “been there since the beginning”. also messing with the idea that magnus got there pretty early too? why not

The desk to Nathan’s right honks gratingly against the linoleum floor, and whatever shithead chose the seat makes a show of sighing and groaning over their own presence in detention. Nathan doesn’t lift his forehead up from his own desk at all, just cracks one eye open centimeters away from the artificial wood grain and somebody else’s initials. Bad enough that he had to attend, worse that there were other people present, and terrible that this guy chose the seat directly next to his out of all the empty desks. Wasn’t this supposed to operate like urinal manners - be as far away from one another as possible? 

From the door, the algebra teacher hosting detention leans in and tsks. “Nathan, you need to be productive for this to count,” she scolds. “Otherwise you’ll be here again tomorrow for your lunch. You too, William.” 

She does not wait for a response before closing the door again, retreating into her office between this classroom and the next. “Have to anyway,” Nathan responds under his breath, dragging himself into an upright position at his desk. He yanks a battered spiral notebook from his deflated backpack, flapping it open to a random blank page. 

Just as he’s about to pretend to write an essay, the guy next to him starts talking. “Hey,” he says. Nathan tries to ignore him, and he repeats it louder this time, as if Nathan hearing him properly is the issue. “Hey.”

Nathan grits his teeth and tries harder, a gnawed pencil clutched in his fist and held over the page like he’s deciding where to stab. Heavy divots mar the page from where he’s carved into the previous leaf already. 

“Aren’t you John Wilkes Puke?” says William. He has a heavy lisp, and an accusatory tone. 

Nathan immediately hates him. He wonders who is still naming their kid William in this day and age. To him it seems like a grandpa name, or something a snooty sweater vest rich kid would be named. Possibly even both - a decrepit old guy with a British accent. Still refusing to actually look at William, he nods. “Yeah,” he grunts. Even if he wanted to have a conversation, he wasn’t sure what else he’d say. Guilty as charged - not that he felt bad about what he did to robot Lincoln. 

The guy shifts in his seat, grumbling to himself. Nathan stares too intently at his notebook to notice him nodding approvingly. “I heard it got you kicked off the football team.”

This time Nathan looks at him, unsure if it was worth it to snap back. “Uhh, kinda,” he starts, momentarily distracted by William’s actual appearance battling it out against the mental image based on his name. He felt like he should feel bad for thinking it, but sometimes you could just look at another kid and tell their family was poor. Immediately, he could tell William was dirt poor. This guy was gaunt, looking a bit like a skeleton wearing secondhand clothes. His shorts were too-long jeans cut off at his knee and held up with an old leather belt. The way his boots were laced, Nathan could tell they didn’t fit him right. The only thing shiny and new about him was his black eye. The sight makes him forget to be angry about his football bruises being prodded, but he loops back around without prompting. “Mostly it was the, uh. Underage drinking part.” 

He didn’t particularly enjoy anyone else on the team, but being kicked off wasn’t exactly a high point. For one thing, his dad was pissed. For another, it had once again become incredibly frowned upon for him to tackle guys to the ground. He missed that part the most. There were also the girls and their attention, but girls so far had meant a lot of drama as well. More than anything, he had enjoyed the easy access to alcohol; it was an open secret in the school, but the rule was that no consequences would arise as long as the players behaved and didn’t get caught. Nathan had blown it, in more ways than one. 

“Cool,” William says, genuinely impressed, but failing to play it off as artfully as he seemed to think. Not one to be outdone, he folds his scarred arms over his baggy shirt and holds his head high. His jawline looked like he would maybe wind up being handsome someday, if he cleaned up and got consistent meals. “I set fire to my school bus.” A pause, for effect. “With my class in it.”

Nathan stares back blankly, expecting this to be a line of bullshit. Maybe his uncle works for Atari, too. He knew too many kids like this, that would say anything to impress him, but it wasn’t something he understood yet. “Did they die?” he asked, one part genuine curiosity and one part inviting this weirdo to spoon feed him some more. 

William sinks lower in the desk, his feet propped up on the book basket of the seat in front of him and bending the wire. “No,” he huffs, seeming disappointed. “But I had to move schools.”

“Huh,” the ex-footballer grunts, now uncertain of the degree to which this was made up for street cred. By teenager logic, which he also functioned under the governance of, anyone trying to impress or trick anyone else would have said the entire class died. Plus he’d not heard much about this kid, despite growing up in this school district his whole life. When your mom knows your classmates’ moms from their shared Lamaze class, it gets easy to remember names through sheer repetition. “What did you say your name was?”

“William Murderface,” the guy says, seeming hurt that Nathan had to ask. “I’m in your math class.”

Nathan shakes his head, his uneven black hair falling directly into his eyes. He swipes it away, squinting at the other boy, but still isn’t able to place him. “Never seen you before.” Murderface. This guy had to be fucking with him. 

“I didn’t say I actually  _ show up _ much,” he clarifies. “Why do you think I’m in detention in the first fucking place? Jeezy.” 

His already-stern eyebrows lowering, Nathan sneers at the outburst, shrugging one broad shoulder. “I dunno, figured it had something to do with the black eye?” 

This seems to make the stranger back down quickly, averting his gaze to the laminated posters tacked up around the room and the vague remnants of numbers still on the chalkboard. “No,” he says. “I slipped.”

It strikes Nathan as strange, that this guy would so readily share information about his alleged crimes at a previous school, then divert attention away from something that could actually be regarded as a teenage badge of courage. Not yet equipped to understand this brand of deflection, he took it as a sign that his school bus arson was a crock of shit. “Huh,” responds Nathan again, returning to his notebook paper. 

William pulls out his own, a composition notebook with a mottled black and white cover barely hanging on through luck alone. He draws a pen from his shorts and immediately curls over his paper like he has something to hide, scratching audibly on the thin sheets. Nathan pays him no mind, slowly and carefully writing in pencil, pressing hard into the pages again. The words repeat themselves, short sentences marching slowly down the page.  _ I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.  _ He jigs his leg rapidly underneath his desk, trying not to focus on how he can hear the clock ticking away. It doesn’t help. He has to pee. He wants a sandwich. He knows he’s going to miss Double Dare.

“Check it out,” William says, holding his notebook up in front of his face. On the page is a crosshatched drawing of their shared math teacher’s head, impaled on a stake. Stringy gore drips down the wood and worms spawn from her eyes and the shattered top of her head. The background features many more stakes adorned with many more heads, but they’re further away and unidentifiable. It’s no masterpiece, being something that took a teenager twenty minutes to draw - but for what it is, it’s impressive. In a way, it pisses Nathan off - resenting that he thinks the drawing is cool, resenting that he did not want to be in detention and did not want to make a new friend. Yet here’s this asshole, hammering out a gory drawing like it’s nothing. 

Nathan grinds his teeth and informs William sincerely that his drawing is awesome. 

* * *

Four weeks later, they sit in Nathan’s garage the same way they do every day. William’s bony ass caves in a cardboard box full of Christmas lights, the body of his bass guitar held between his ankles as he eats a burger around the neck. Nathan awkwardly lurks in his dad’s folding camping chair, the seat low enough that his legs are too long and his knees jut up like a frog. He shovels four chili cheese french fries into his mouth at once, washing it down with an enormous soda. 

The concept of a band has metastasized between them, starting roughly in the same conversation wherein they discovered their similar tastes in music. This phenomenon was not unfamiliar to Nathan - collect any two to five teenagers with strong feelings about a musical genre, add time, multiply by weed, and you’d have two to five teenagers convinced that they are A Band and they will one day be swimming in pools of titties and money. Their band will have a shelf life that lasts until they realize how hard they actually have to work in order to procure said titties and money.

The major difference in their situation was that William actually owned an instrument, which he even knew how to play. This already put them ahead of the competition, but what truly made it malignant was that Nathan was serious about it. His voice sounded like he had gone through puberty three times over, which made for great vocals. The ideas for lyrics came to him easily, especially in his science and history classes when he halfway paid attention. Unsolved Mysteries was also a great source of inspiration. 

His lyrics notebook sits on the cement floor in between his shoes, splayed open to a list of potential band names. Murderface has one of his own, held in his non-burger hand but still smeared with burger juices. 

“Skullfucked Nun,” reads Nathan. 

William makes a humming noise, shrugging one gangly shoulder. “Purple Snot Rocket?”

“What? No,” Nathan says, honking his straw in his soda lid. “Infected Wound.”

Murderface nods apprehensively. “Not bad, but it needs...” He gestures with his burger, and a slice of tomato slips out and plaps wetly to the floor. Nathan’s dog lifts itself up from the shade and bustles over to it, its claws skittering on the concrete. It licks at the tomato, curls its lips over its teeth, and decides to just lick the condiments off. “I don’t know. It needs something.”

Nathan nods solemnly, looking over his list. “Yeah, yeah, I got you. It needs to be nastier. It’s got to be really nasty.” He leans forward, the chair creaking under his weight as he squints at his list. He wished he could have either dyslexia or bad handwriting - not both at the same time. “I got some random words on here that were cool...”

Finishing his burger, Murderface peels his lost tomato away from the dog and drops it and his burger wrapper into his paper bag. “I really like ‘infected’, maybe some kind of infected wound. Full of bugs or something.” 

Nathan lights up, sitting up straighter and pointing at his friend. “Oh, that’s good - like worms and shit. Like you got cut open and you’re rotting and there’s worms.” He snaps his fingers, trying to prompt himself to remember something. “Like when we found that possum by the road, last week. All fat and oozy..”

“Rancid... Flesh Worms,” Murderface tries, looking back to his own list of gross words he’s thought of. “No, rancid isn’t good.” His eyebrows knit together over his broad face, his chin held thoughtfully in his hand. 

Standing, Nathan takes their bags of fast food trash and heads for the door leading into his home. Murderface waits patiently in the garage, wiping his hands on his shorts. Rarely did he go inside, especially not while the folks were home. Nathan’s house was pretty nice, and he always had a weird feeling like he shouldn’t be there. Like he was ruining their carpet just by existing on top of it, or something. It wasn’t something he knew how to articulate to Nathan, so he usually just said that Rose being so nice to him made him nervous. It wasn’t a lie - he didn’t know how to act around people who felt sorry for him. 

Nathan returns with his science textbook, and immediately Murderface turns his nose up in offense. “Man what the fuck, it’s Saturday,” he complains. “I’m not doin’ any homework.” He crosses his arms across his chest defiantly, as if he would do any of his homework, ever. 

“Not for homework, spaz,” Nathan grunts, dropping his big body back into the camping chair. He holds the book on his knees, his face close to it as he flips the pages around. “I saw something cool in here I just forgot about.” 

Murderface waits for him patiently, pulling a bone-handled knife out of his boot and digging at the dirt underneath his nails in the meantime. The knife, like most of his belongings, came from grandpa Thunderbolt. Nathan had met him once, hanging out in front of the Murderface family trailer while William ran inside to grab his bass guitar after school. Thunderbolt spat chewing tobacco into the weeds and told Nathan he could tell he had Native blood, but refused to explain further. He wore a turquoise bolo tie and gave a cigarette to Nathan and William both. He was probably the coolest old guy Nathan had ever met. William was proud - and relieved that Nathan had gotten distracted by his grandpa, instead of following him inside the trailer. 

“Here it is,” Nathan grunted, holding the book up so Murderface could see. “Secacious.” 

Murderface leaned in, the cardboard under him giving way a little under the shift. He scowled at the image of someone’s scalp, greasy and crawling with tiny worms and covered in irritated sores. “I think it’s sebaceous,” he corrects, but nods. “Sebaceous Worm, that’s cool, that’s a good name.” 

“We just need it cooler,” Nathan nods, casting the textbook aside. “Worms in your hair isn’t cool,” he thinks aloud, remembering in first grade when everybody had to get lice checked and a couple

kids came back to school with their heads shaved down to peach fuzz. He had not participated in the merciless bullying of these kids, but had been quietly proud his hair had passed inspection. 

Murderface scratches at himself, the burger sitting heavy in his stomach. Outside of school lunches, it’s the first thing he’s eaten in a few days, and so much food all at once hurts a little. “Maybe in your guts, eating you from the inside out,” he suggests. “Like John Hurt.” He mimes with his hands, arms forming a tentacle with his fingers for jaws, bursting out from his stomach, chomping and snarling. 

Chewing his lip, Nathan nods, muttering to himself inaudibly. He pauses, pinching a seam at the knee of his jeans between his fingers and picking at the threads. “Is it stupid to name a band when it’s just got two people?”

“No,” says Murderface, immediately and with conviction, as if he had ever done this before. “We just establish ourselves as the authority so for when other guys join they know what’s up already.” He nods, agreeing with his own bullshit answer. “Besides, you said that one guy from the marching band might join as drummer.”

“You need more than bass and drums and vocals for a band,” Nathan growls, looking back to his notebook on the ground. He toes his canvas tennis shoe through a dried up oil stain, lip curled back over his teeth. Before Murderface can respond, he shakes his head, black hair smacking him in the eyelids as he rids himself of doubt. “We can ask that guy we always see at the record store, he plays the guitar.”

“That guy does crack, I think,” Murderface says. “And he looks like a goat.”

“But he can play guitar.”

Murderface pauses, then nods. “Yeah. And that’s all most bands do anyway. Look at what’s-his-nuts.”

“Yeah, Ozzy.”

“No! ...Well, yeah, but—“

“Nikki Sixx?”

“Yeah, him too, or Crüe in general, but I mean...”

“Oh, that Snakes n’ Barrels guy,” Nathan nods. 

“Yeah, yeah, him,” Murderface nods, pretending hard that he does not know the name of the singer in one of his favorite bands. “...Well, Snakes n’ Barrels in general, too.”

“Tons of rock stars do crack,” Nathan says. “It’s not a problem, people would probably think we’re more brutal for it.”

Silence passes between them for a moment, and Murderface stares out the open garage door at Rose’s Buick and the little dent Nathan put in the front bumper when learning to drive. “Should  _ we  _ do crack?” he asks. 

“What the fuck? No,” Nathan says, shaking his head. His eyebrows angle further downwards than normal at the notion, then relax as he seems to consider it. “At least not yet. It’s really expensive and my dad would gut me.” 

“Okay,” Murderface agrees. “We’ll wait until we’re famous for the crack.”

“Gutslash,” Nathan mutters. “Sebaceous Gutslash Worm?” His green eyes go a little wide as he gets warmer. 

Picking up his notebook, the bassist starts scribbling, trying to sound out the word sebaceous, and winding up at sebacious. “Needs something,” he huffs, waving his pen. 

“For the flow, yeah.” Nathan stands up, pacing the garage, looking at cardboard boxes of holiday decorations and old clothes and weird toys his parents got him when trying to get him to talk. A plastic skeletal hand sticks out of the Halloween decorations box, stuffed too full to close all the way. Last year Halloween had been on a Friday, and Nathan wanted to go all-out with decorating. “Ghost worm,” he says to it, then immediately shook his head. “Wraith worm.” 

“Like from Dungeons and Dragons?” Murderface asks. 

“I’ll kill you,” Nathan grunts defensively. Dungeons and Dragons was a sore spot - it had genuinely interested them both, but the rules and math confused them and they didn’t know of anyone else who played except for nerds. So instead, they pretended to hate it and decided it was lame dork stuff, their teenage reputations propped up on popsicle sticks and the bitterness of being bad at something. “But yeah, kinda. Sebaceous Gutslash Wraith Worm. There it is.”

“Sick,” said William, setting to work immediately on their logo. 

* * *

The drummer is a guy from the marching band, and neither Nathan or Murderface knows his actual name. Instead, he goes by Fetus, on account of stealing a jarred animal fetus from the science classroom. Exactly what animal it was depends entirely on who was asked - Fetus himself could not keep it straight, nor could he produce the jar for any proof. The guy is shorter than the both of them, heavyset, and shaved bald except for one six inch long tuft hair centered right above his forehead, dangling directly into his eyes. His drum kit also includes a battered metal trash can. 

Nathan decides that he will do; something about looking a beggar in the mouth. Or maybe the phrase was about how horses can’t make choices? His point, he tells Murderface when they are alone, is that Fetus was chosen to be here for now, but will be replaced as soon as they find someone better. A band with a shitty drummer is better than a band with no drummer at all, and in this business he’s pretty sure you have to be cutthroat about it. 

The guitarist is a different story. The one time they catch the goat-looking guy at the record store, he sneers at them over the rims of his circular tinted shades, his wrist draped over his beautiful Les Paul and his spidery fingers just barely touching the strings. 

“When you can pay me, we’ll talk,” he says, and refuses to give his name. 

Sebacious Gutslash Wraith Worm plays their first show without a guitarist, and out of a basement belonging to an acquaintance of a friend. It’s packed and sweaty, no one is sober enough to tell if they’re any good or not, and the awful racket they make results in the neighbors calling the cops. Nathan boosts Murderface out of a narrow window into the backyard, and follows him up. Too broad to fit after them, their drummer hides in the dryer, and is discovered stuck in it six hours later by the party host’s mom.

Nathan feels ten feet tall for a week, but some distant part of him unsatisfied and frustrated. He wants bigger and louder. 

* * *

“I’m dropping out,” Nathan says, unblinkingly watching hurricane coverage muted on the spare television he’s moved out to the garage. “Of school. To focus on the band.”

“Okay,” says drummer number two. Nathan did not know his name, and he never once shared it, only stating at Fetus’ funeral that they had been friends. It turned out that the drum kit Fetus used had actually belonged to this guy, which meant they never needed to haul the equipment out of the garage. It worked out for everybody, except maybe Fetus, but Nathan figured that if you die horribly because a heckler threw a broken beer bottle at you really good, then you probably don’t care what happens to your band or your kit afterwards. 

Murderface rifles around in one of the cardboard boxes of Halloween decorations, some of the only things that Rose had not yet moved into storage to make room in the garage for the boys. “Your mom know?” he asks, pulling out an enormous wad of cotton spiderweb and moving it aside. 

Nathan inhales and pauses, which is a loaded response. William immediately understands why he wasn’t able to hang out yesterday. “Yeah,” he nods. “She said it’s okay, because I do really bad in school but now I have this, and then maybe I get a...” He pauses, baring his teeth at the TV in distaste but resigned acceptance. “ _ Part time job. _ ”

“I already graduated,” says drummer number two, to no response. He was two years older than the both of them, and seemed to always make a point of trying to remind them. It wasn’t always appreciated, especially since he didn’t seem any older - especially not living with his mom still, and having her trim his mohawk and sew patches on his jacket for him. “I could help get you a job where I work.” 

Only responding with a grunt, their vocalist doesn’t want to admit he’d almost rather go to school than flip burgers. “What about you, Murderface?” 

Murderface, who hated school and did just as badly in it as Nathan, but somehow managed to show up even less, holds up a rubber mask with most of the paint flaking off. “I’ll work somethin’ out,” he grumbles, trying to figure out what the malformed mask was supposed to be. Wolfman? Burt Reynolds? So far, he had skated by in his high school career by imitating Stella’s voice on the phone and updating their contact phone number to one belonging to an out-of-business Chinese restaurant so she could not be notified of his poor grades or attendance. Part of dropping out meant a meeting with a counselor, which a legal guardian had to be present for - meaning something Murderface could not bullshit his way out of. Maybe he could try extortion? Worth a shot. 

Accepting it as a legitimate answer, Nathan doesn’t press further. He adjusts the antenna on the TV a little, watching the weatherman gesture at a map of Florida with urgency. “Maybe,” he starts, then pauses to formulate his thoughts. “Maybe we... could use your check to help pay that guy. That guitarist.”

“Okay,” drummer number two says apprehensively. He looks around at their one bass guitar and damaged drum kit, and thinks about what other things would be fun to buy with his paycheck instead of having it become someone else’s. But the band stands to make more money than what he’s paid at the Dickie Duncan, and they’re never going to get anywhere sounding like a garbage disposal. “We really gotta get a guitarist.” 

Murderface pulls a hand-sewn executioner’s mask out of the Halloween decorations, pulling it down over his head and compressing his hair. It takes some work to get the triangle eyeholes to line up, but before he can complete the job, Nathan has snatched it off his head to keep for himself. Murderface’s hair springs back into shape immediately. The mask gets added to a separate box, big uneven sharpie letters on the side declaring  _ band stuff _ . 

* * *

“Abysmal,” sneers Magnus Hammersmith, fingers curling around the length of his beard. While he may have refused to tell them his name, the record store cashier was more than happy to provide it to them - and express her annoyance that he hangs out there all nearly day. 

Murderface goes from standing tall to living up to his name instantly. He inhales through his gap-toothed snarl, preparing to launch a verbal attack against this critic. Nathan planting an enormous hand in the center of his chest stops him, but just barely.

“Yeah, we don’t have a guitarist.” Nathan pauses, then tentatively lowers his hand from his bassist’s chest once he’s sure the guy isn’t going to publicly assault someone they’re trying to recruit. When Murderface doesn’t instantly lunge forward, he relaxes fully and leans down to switch off the little boombox he’s set down on the heinous multicolored carpet between them. 

Magnus folds his arms, unimpressed and unthreatened. “I noticed.” He makes a show of looking at his fingernails, one of which is much longer than the others. Nathan wonders if it helps him strum or something. 

Ignoring that Murderface has taken to mocking the gesture and rolling his eyes, Nathan clears his throat. “And we... would like you to be that. Our guitarist.” 

“And I have already told you,” Magnus sighs, turning his attention back to tuning his guitar. “Either you pay me, or you find someone else.” 

“Well, we can pay you now,” Murderface snaps, fumbling a row of bass string packets off the rack he’s idly browsing, antsy to have something to do with his hands. He curses and tries to get them all hung back on the metal display arm, dropping several of them a second time in the process. 

Magnus looks from Murderface to Nathan expectantly, too much silence passing between them. From the counter at the front of the store, the cashier yells out that they’re closing in ten minutes. The guitarist shoots her a nasty look. “Are you going to tell me how much?”

Growing impatient, Nathan shoves his fists into his letterman jacket. He had carefully removed his football patches, replacing them instead with logos from bands he enjoyed. Most of them were crooked, because he refused to let his mom do it for him. “One thirty-five every two weeks, plus equal share of what we make from shows.” 

The guy barks a humorless laugh, his hand dropping over the strings of his guitar and making a muted twang. If not for his strap, it would have slipped out of his lap. “I may as well flip burgers, at that rate.” He stands up from his metal folding chair, ducking out from under the guitar strap and placing it back in its case. 

Murderface curses under his breath, but Nathan grows indignant and stands himself up straighter. Magnus seemed close to the same height as Nathan, but his Cuban heels give him a slight advantage. He tries to leer at the lead singer, but Nathan doesn’t budge. “Okay, well. How much are you making here?”

“Nothing,” snaps the cashier from the register. “He doesn’t work here, just won’t leave, but now  _ all _ of you have to, because we’re closing and I want to go  _ home _ . Creepy old man.” 

The annoyed look on Magnus’ face doubles, his eyes widening white and then narrowing. “It is my right as a customer to be here,  _ Kimberly _ .” He spits her name like a curse, but the way he looks back at Nathan betrays that she is absolutely correct. He adjusts his grip on his guitar case and exhales sharply. “Fine. I’ll join your band. But for your sake I hope you’re as serious about it as I am.” 

Nathan doesn’t dignify him with an argument as they walk out of the store together and into the rest of the sprawling shopping center, announcements over the intercom cheerily reminding people to get the hell out so the employees can close. The place smells like popcorn and hairspray, and David Bowie’s tour advertisements are plastered everywhere. “You can meet us here to practice,” he growls, handing the guy a battered index card with his address written on it. 

“When,” Magnus sneers. Murderface quietly wonders if sneering is all he can do. He hopes his guitar playing is more varied than his personality. 

“Tomorrow, whenever.” Nathan shrugs one shoulder, again refusing to be as annoyed with him as their bassist is. “There’s a bus stop nearby, if you don’t have a car.” 

“I’ll be there,” their new guitarist nods, then shoots a sour look at Nathan. “And I  _ do _ have a car.” 

— 

It turns out that Magnus is a pretty good guitarist, and they work well together as a band even if he is a bit controlling. They’re productive together, with Nathan and Magnus turning out a good range of songs for them. The in-fighting is rarely vicious, and centers mainly around which gigs they will and will not play. Sebacious Gutslash Wraith Worm upgrades from suburban basements to dive bars, occasionally managing to open for the openers of much bigger bands. Their drummer does not die horrifically in the midst of being heckled. They even manage to get hired on at a wedding reception with a biker gang guest list, in which a fistfight breaks out that has nothing to do with any of them, for once. They even get fed at that one.

Murderface successfully obtains his diploma, claiming to have threatened the principal with a knife. The band tentatively believes it, because he doesn’t have the money for bribery and he never shows up or does the work to earn it rightfully. Magnus claims to have gone to college, but never elaborates on his major or shares many other personal details at all. Drummer Two theorizes that he is a completely normal deadbeat, trying to be mysterious to seem cooler to them since he’s older than the rest of the band. Nathan insists it doesn’t matter. 

They discuss obtaining a rhythm guitarist, but none of the ads up at the shows or music stores look remotely promising. In order to fund the band and flyer more, both Murderface and Nathan hit pavement for part time jobs, starting at a moving company. At the end of their first two weeks, the two of them drop a glass-topped coffee table and silently quit, pretending it didn't happen. Their checks go entirely towards replacing the garbage can in number two’s kit, and flyering for their shows. 

Several times, Nathan is exhausted enough to fall asleep during the band’s solos. Magnus in particular was fond of drawing out his playing until the crowd started throwing shit. At least Nathan could nap standing up, and his hair had gotten long enough to hide his face and make him look like he was brooding as the other guys showed off. They did, however, have to tell Murderface more than once that he shouldn’t sit down on the stage or his amp while Magnus did his thing. 

They all knew that Sebacious Gutslash Wraith Worm sucked ass, objectively and comparatively. The crowds of long-haired dudes in battle jackets still zoned out sometimes, and weren’t exactly nice to them once they got off stage. But sometimes, the crowds chanted  _ worm, worm, worm,  _ and broke out into pits, and the older guys in the better bands would tell Nathan he was gonna go far with a voice like that. He’d just have to find the right band to do it with. 

Nathan nods each time he was told this, and goes back to helping his guys pack their shit into Magnus’ car parked in the alley. He wondered how he ought to break it to Drummer Two that his obsolescence was planned and counted on. He wondered how the fuck he’d find a rhythm guitarist that could match Magnus.

Instead of worrying about it, he hunches over his lyrics notebook in the passenger seat on the dark drives back home, and writes songs that he doesn’t share with the band yet.

These, he wants to save until the time is right. Until the band is right. 


	3. our only goal is the western shore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Impulse, instincts, illegal immigration and a lot more things that Toki is not yet old enough to understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i did not mean for this to be so long i am so sorry 
> 
> but hey now the tags can include toki

Toki’s ribs ache, and his hips and knees ache, and his shoulders ache. The luggage he’s crammed himself into doesn’t seem nearly as big now as it did when he first got in. His stomach is empty but hurts regardless, and he’s not sure if it’s the emptiness itself or if it’s the motion of the cargo bay he’s been loaded onto. The passage of time was a mystery to him, and he could not tell if it had been an hour or five or ten. 

Normally, he was used to this - discomfort and isolation and pain suffered while tucked into small spaces, some never intended for human occupation. Loneliness, pain and hunger were far from foreign, and he had learned to let his mind wander to different places to make the time pass more quickly in between chores. Sometimes, in between going to bed for the night and waking up for the next round of chores in the morning, he was not sure if he had slept at all or just lay awake all night. He was not sure if he dreamed, or imagined, or if his mind was simply empty the whole time.

He could not decide if this was easier or harder than anything else he had ever done. He had never been on a plane or been to America, nor even imagined ever doing either of those things. He had been hurt before, had experienced this same stiff disturbance of his joints, but being unable to divorce his mind from the situation and the stimulus was alien. Did that mean he was suffering too badly, that his brain would no longer allow itself to drift away from the body like it had so many times before? Or was that just a flag of his excitement, that he was too present to separate from where he was and what was happening? Adults - not his parents, of course - had told him before that there were many things he would come to understand only when he was older. This was another one for that list, he figured. 

He shifted and remembered things at home freezing together, needing force to get hinges or wheels to break free of the ice. His movements caused him to bump into the guitar case crammed inside with him, making it bump against the walls. Toki sucked air through his teeth, his hands drifting over the instrument in the dark and trying to detect any further damage to it. It was already chipped on the curves of the body, and needed new strings weeks ago. The bare wood showed on its body, and he had had to wrap tape around one of the points to keep it sturdy. All of these were problems he could not handle, and if they got worse or something else happened, he would be hopeless. The guitar was his lifeline. 

There was no way Runke would ever forgive him for taking it with him. He had borrowed it to begin with; ages ago someone had traded it into the shop, and Runke had made it clear that the only reason Toki had been allowed to learn to play it was because he hadn’t been able to find someone else to be the rhythm guitarist in his black metal band. Toki did not know the current name, as Runke tended to change it whenever the other members changed, and that was beyond what Toki was capable of keeping up with. He was never an official member anyway, so what sense did it make to worry himself with that? All he had to do was be good at playing it the way he was told. Runke pushed him hard and snapped at him often, but he knew he would have to endure it to play better, the same way he had to endure his parents to become stronger. Runke wanted it fast, so that’s what Toki gave him. He thought he was pretty good, and he could tell Runke did too, even if he would never say so. 

He considered this to be a double-borrowing of the guitar. When his dreams came true, he told himself he would mail it back home where it belonged, provided it lived that long. Provided  _ he  _ lived that long, anyway. If it fell apart, he would simply use his income from his new band to replace it, and the krone he took out of the register to fund this adventure. He refused to think any further on “if” and “when”, any more dwelling on the concept of failing would make his stomach sicker, and this box was far too small to be doing that in it. 

The guilt from his theft was heavy on his shoulders, but ever since Runke had left out an open page of Kreator magazine, mentioning that an American band had had a violent incident with their rhythm guitarist, he knew what he had to do. He had never heard of this band before, but Runke said he’d received a demo tape from a mailing list a few weeks back. He had cast it aside, because he only had ears for black metal, but Toki was able to recover it from a box of many others. He slid the little cassette into the shop’s battered tape player, and stood at the counter hearing Dethklok for the first time. Everything about their music made his heart feel clutched tight in a massive fist. They were holding rehearsals for a replacement rhythm guitarist soon, and some base part of him knew he must be there no matter the cost. The reaction came from the same place of his mind that told him to flinch away when his father raised his hand, or how to move when he felt snow give way beneath his feet, or made his mouth water when he looked in the window at the bakery and saw pastries and loaves of bread. Something kneejerk, beyond his control, and beyond learning or wanting. 

The magazine article called them death metal, which Runke said was inferior to black metal; they were poseurs, they weren’t  _ true _ . Toki did not care. When Runke stepped out for a lunch break, Toki pulled out the phone book from under the counter and used the shop’s telephone to ring and ask how much a flight to America could cost. The very polite woman on the other end of the phone said a number that made his stomach drop like a rock into his battered shoes. He thanked her politely and hung up the phone, then stood at the counter with his fingers clutching the glass display. The tiny silver register key sat on the shelf at his feet and he stared at it, then looked at the door Runke had left through. 

The register didn’t have enough in it for the ticket, but it did have enough for a taxi to the airport in Oslo. The rest from there was improvisation, athleticism he developed from sheer necessity, and a lot of pure dumb luck. He spent several hours in the airport itself, waiting for the soonest available flight to America to show on the boards. By then it was dark, which suited him just fine. Once he knew which gate to get to, he slipped out the first door he could find and ran as fast as his skinny legs could carry him. The man driving the baggage cart abandoned it to have a cigarette, just long enough for Toki to find something large enough to hold an electric guitar and a teenage boy. He ripped what must have been a month’s worth of outfits from the large suitcase, stashing them as carefully as he could out of sight, hoping for their owner’s sake that they would not be ruined. 

The rest was this - the waiting, the discomfort, and thinking of his parents. He had not bothered to go home to say goodbye, because he knew it would not be goodbye. He had kept his guitar playing a secret from them ever since he had gotten in trouble for dawdling in town, and he had learned the hard way that Runke was not his friend’s real name - it was a nickname, and an obscene one at that. Toki knew that returning home would mean that he would be beaten, and he would never make it to America. So he had run away, as fast as he could. 

And now, folded into a dark container shoved into a baggage hold and surrounded by the dull roar of the airplane’s engines, he tells himself that he will write to them. He had begun mentally composing his letter to them while he was still in the taxi, but even without any paper he had scrapped what now must have been hundreds of attempts. He tries to convince himself to save it for when the plane lands, when he is truly out of their reach, but his mind continually circles back to the subject. Repeatedly he cycles between wanting to beg for forgiveness and not being sorry an ounce. Simultaneously, he loves his parents and he hates them. Finally, arriving at no conclusion, he decides this is yet another item on that list. 

He feels with certainty, though, that he will not send them any money. Runke will be paid back in full, but he knows his parents will have no interest in it. If they were inclined towards such things, he figured they would have lived in Lillehammer and run a shop the way everyone else did. Instead they chose social isolation, and that meant living off the land, which meant no money. Money was something he handled only briefly - once he was old enough, he was frequently tasked with delivering the extra fish and rabbits he and his parents caught to the shops, where the nice ladies and gentlemen would give him money for them. Immediately he would cross the street to the general store, where the money and a list of items written by his father would be handed to the nice man, and he would carry home the items and give them to his father. Any extra was given to his father as well, and, like everything else, never spoken of. Toki understood it to be one of many sins, and despite his desires to escape that life, he knew his parents would never be swayed, and he decides to himself not to cause them any further grievance than he already seemed to. 

Suddenly, in the darkness, it occurs to him that the guilt he feels for running away is the same animal as the guilt he had been made to feel for burdening his parents with his presence in the first place. It is no different to him, and no worse. He wonders if they will even be upset by his absence at all; if his father will feel guilt and Anja will weep in silence, if they will pray to God for his safety... Or if they will hug one another and pray to God joyously for thanks. He can’t identify whether he has upset himself further by this thread of thought, or if he has shrugged a weight off his shoulders.

There’s another thing going on that list, he supposes. 

* * *

What feels like years later, but is only about thirteen hours, Toki wakes up when the plane bumps roughly down onto the runway. He clutches the guitar to his body to keep it from being bounced around in what little empty space they share, and he keeps his grip on it as the baggage is removed from the belly of the bird and tossed onto another motorized cart. It’s hot here, hotter than he has ever imagined to be possible, and his small travel quarters don’t help. He works his fingertip into the small gap where the zipper meets its end, then pries it down slowly and peers out into his new world. 

It’s the brightest light he’s ever seen in his life; brighter than the sun shining off the snow, against the bright white-blue sky. He knows he’s been in the darkness for too long, making the transition more extreme, and he recoils back into his huge suitcase to let his eyes adjust slowly. He presses his palms to his eyes and tries to coax away the blotches. Finally, as he hears voices outside and the cart begins to move, his eyes stop throbbing in pain. Peeking out now, he looks to the driver and to the glaring American world around him to ensure the coast is clear. His grip on his guitar case is awkward and painful, and he births himself out from the baggage and onto the asphalt. Instantly he’s glad for the noise of the world, between the engines of the planes and the baggage carts, because the hand not holding the guitar hits the pavement. It reminds Toki of touching an iron pan fresh from the fire, and he yelps, but not loud enough for anyone to have noticed his emergence. He doesn’t dwell, instead taking off sprinting for the nearest cover so he can slink his way inside the airport. 

Inside isn’t much different from the airport in Oslo, but it doesn’t stop Toki from hating it. Too many people, too many things to see, too many noises, too many smells. It’s hard for his brain to process, and he stumbles like when the ice takes his feet out from under him. No one seems to notice he’s come in from a door he shouldn’t, and no one notices he’s unaccompanied and dressed in tattered clothing. Anyone who looks his way looks through him, going about their business and only seeming to stare in his general direction, never indicating having seen him at all. He moves too quickly for most to even register. 

The navigational signs are easy to follow, and he understands he must make two stops - currency exchange, and somewhere that sells a map. Currency is easy, but his kroner equal out to fewer dollars than anticipated, and the proper map costs more than he would have liked. He sits down outside of an internal Starbucks to examine it, unaware and uncaring that he is seated so closely to the US Customs office. Immigration and border patrol are foreign concepts to him, having grown up sheltered and attending no normal school. The idea that he has done something illegal evades him completely; instead, he focuses much more intently on deciphering the map. After careful observation of the signs around him, he determines this is the Fort Lauderdale airport. He double checks the torn magazine page stuffed in his pocket, and it definitely says the band he has his heart set on is located in the Tampa area. The conversion from miles to kilometers doesn’t matter, because either way, the distance makes dread curl in his stomach and make itself at home. 

Nearly two hundred and fifty miles to travel, or nearly four hundred kilometers, with nothing to his name but a hundred dollars, the clothes on his back, the battered shoes on his feet, and his guitar. Not to mention, he has mere days before auditions are held.

His stomach growls. 

Toki decides to invoke the energy of something he heard Runke utter many, many times:  _ Faen det hele. _ He stands and goes to the Starbucks counter, looking at all the pastries through the glass display. He orders four items, which cost in total much more than he would like, but he figures that if he must struggle then he may as well struggle with a stomach full of cheese danishes and coffee cake. 

* * *

He makes it as far as Weston on foot, and going by the sun it takes him five or six hours. The walking doesn’t bother him any, but the setting does. The visuals of America are abusive to his eyes, and he feels that everywhere he looks is some kind of advertisement. Signs hang everywhere, people are everywhere, and this place is filled with the ugliest trees he has ever seen. They tower almost as high as the millions of telephone and light poles, but they have no branches except an explosion of them clear at the top. Their bark peels off them like sheets of paper, and everything about them is rough to the touch. The sun was the worst, and when he normally felt under-dressed in Norway, here it was only his own modesty that kept him from stripping off his thin clothing and discarding it by the roadside, along with the rest of the bits of litter that seemed to ambiently collect on the ground everywhere. His hair sticks to his forehead and hangs around his face in strings, and he breathes hard through his mouth as he nears the edge of the city, the highway stretching out in front of him to the west. 

The smell here is powerful, always sharp and thick and drowning out the familiar smell of the ocean, and he knows most of it to come from gasoline. While the sun may be difficult to cope with, it’s the air that first makes him doubt everything that he’s done so far. Still, he puts one foot in front of the other. 

Several times, a car pulls over in front of him on the shoulder of the highway, but as he draws closer to it, the driver swerves back into the flow of traffic and blends with the thousands of others tearing towards the horizon. He can hear them laughing sometimes if there’s a break in the passing cars and they have their windows down, but he does not understand this activity until one car finally does not pull away. He walks close to the concrete barrier at the shoulder, glancing at the driver as he passes, but this driver calls out for his attention. 

“Do you need a ride, man?” It’s a lady, and Toki guesses her to be in her twenties. She wears high waisted jeans, and a tank top, and her hair is bleached to the point of looking a little like dried grass. The back of her car is covered in band stickers, one or two of which Toki recognizes. Immediately, he thinks of her as a friend, and he accepts her ride. She tells him her name, and he struggles to pronounce it. 

She takes him as far as Naples, chatting about music with him all the way, and he twangs at his unplugged guitar for her a little. She compares him to Kirk Hammet, and Adrian Smith, and asks him to play some Guns n’ Roses but isn’t upset when he doesn’t know any. She seems impressed he’s come from Norway, refuses to believe he’s as old as he says he is, and drops him off in a Wal-Mart not far from where she says her apartment is. She points him towards a gas station, and says she hopes to see him on stage some day. He says he hopes so too. 

In the gas station, he picks up a local map. At least this one is free. One hundred and sixty miles to go, or two hundred and sixty kilometers. One day down, and two to go. Between getting food and drinks and repaying the nice lady for the ride by giving her money for gas, he’s dwindled himself down to sixty dollars. He discovers quickly that this is not enough for a hotel room, except for a suspicious one that he gets his hopes up for, but it turns out their rate is hourly, not nightly. He does not yet understand why a hotel would charge by the hour, but his list of things he is not old enough to understand has grown exponentially in the last twenty-four hours, and he is starting to lose track. 

Instead, he sleeps in a public park, his guitar clutched between his body and the back of the bench. It’s wooden, and comfier than his bed at home, and the Florida heat isn’t as oppressive now that the sun has gone down. He sleeps better than he thought possible. 

* * *

What awakens him early the next morning is a gentle drizzle of rain, and his heart is overtaken by cold panic. Toki’s guitar, his prized possession, his best friend, his  _ lifeline,  _ cannot get wet. He bolts for cover, heading first for the public restroom. It’s woefully locked, but the awning provides him cover to strip his shirt off and wrap it around the guitar’s case to prevent any wetness soaking through the fabric. 

He discovers a bus station relatively close by, but the rain splatters down with increasing ferocity, pinning him against the restroom’s brick wall. He curses under his breath, then clutches the strap of his case with white knuckles. He bolts for a group of picnic tables under an aluminum roof, which grants him more cover and a place to sit comfortably. As he sits, he jigs his leg up and down rapidly, desperately trying not to think about how much time the rain is costing him. 

To pass the time, he strums idly on the guitar, rolling through notes and chords he’s learned from albums in Runke’s store, or heard on the radio. He makes up some of his own, but it’s not the same without an amp to connect it to. He quickly grows bored, so instead he chooses a sharp rock out of the gravel and draws on the picnic table. Many people seemed to write their names here, so he adds his own to the mix. After some consideration, he annotates underneath,  _ from Norway.  _ Next to it, he draws a fat bee with wings too small to fly, and elsewhere on the table he draws cats and rabbits and an attempt at a horse. It turns out horses are hard to draw, and he can only get them to look like dogs that weren’t put together right.

Later at the bus station, he finds he has enough money for a bus ticket to Tampa. He also finds that the bus does not leave until the next day, and it will take nearly fifteen hours to arrive in Tampa, because they all run counter-clockwise from Naples to Fort Lauderdale to Orlando, before coming to Tampa and ending back at Naples again. He would not arrive at his audition in time. Toki decides American public transport is awful, but he politely keeps that to himself and thanks the bus ticket lady before walking away to assess his other options. 

Toki discovers a taxi will cost him two hundred dollars, which is out of the question, and so he finds the I-75 and he walks. Still the smells and signs overwhelm him left and right, and despite his ability to find his location on the map and direct himself, he feels disoriented. Everything looks the same, the same logos and signs and pictures and cars pasted over and over everywhere he looks. Lights flash, horns honk, people shout and laugh, and Toki wishes he were in Tampa already. He feels like Tampa will be different, somehow, that once he gets into that city something will change on a fundamental level when he crosses the threshold. Like arriving in an earthly, tropical version of Valhalla. 

Cars again pull over for him sometimes, and again pull away as soon as he smiles and waves at the drivers. He understands the joke now, that they are dangling the promise of kindness in front of his face and snatching it away just when he gets his hopes up. While he gets the play they are making, he never once laughs. When the people in the cars flash middle fingers at him through the windows, he learns to make the gesture back. 

Eventually, someone does give him a ride, but this older man only takes him as far as Fort Myers. In Fort Myers, he buys himself a kids’ meal at a Dickie Duncan’s, and watches children play in the enclosed jungle gym attached to the restaurant. From the other side of the plexiglass window, their rowdy shouting was muted. He stares at the ball pit, chewing his over-salted french fries, his eyes glazed over. His mind wanders back to places he doesn’t want it to go - what if he doesn’t arrive in time? What if he doesn’t get accepted in the audition? What if he has made a mistake?

Toki sips at the soda in his little paper cup and looks out the other window, past the huge smiling Dickie Duncan decal, and scowls. He forces himself to stop thinking about things like that, and instead imagines himself on a stage in front of thousands of people, doing solos in the bright lights. He wonders how much money rock stars make. He figures it must be enough, since so many people became rock stars. He distracts himself, wondering if each member of his band will own their own house. He hopes they all live together, and that they become friends. 

* * *

He hitches a ride on the outskirts of Fort Myers, and this group of young adults takes him to Venice. He tries to chat with them, but they laugh and mock his accent. They invite him to party with them, but seem angry when he refuses. The car comes to a stop in the parking lot a bar, and one of the guys in the back seat with him makes a grab for his guitar. Toki doesn’t understand this man’s intent, but it terrifies him, and the same primal part of his brain that made him scoop money from the register and into his pockets fires its synapses. His legs respond, and they carry him and his guitar across the dark parking lot as fast as he can. Behind him, he hears laughter and cursing and hollering, but his heartbeat dampens it and eventually he is too far away to hear them anymore.

This place is by the ocean, and it only now occurs to Toki that he’s crossed the full width of the Florida peninsula. When he looks at the map under a street light, he seems to have about seventy miles left to go, or a bit more than one hundred kilometers. The conversion between the two units of measurement confuses him, and he wouldn’t be able to figure it out without the map key. He thinks it’s overly complicated to use a different measurement - sure, so far the country was a near inversion of where he came from, but why make it any worse than it had to be?

He picks up another local map in a gas station, and sits on a bench outside to read it and choose his next course of action, hoping to find a park to sleep in. A car pulls up, and the driver does not get out, but the passenger does. Toki glances up and squirms past the car’s headlights, barely able to make out any of the man’s details in his silhouette. He does note he isn’t wearing a shirt under his open jacket, but he doesn’t question this - America is strange, and it’s impolite to stare. The stranger enters the gas station, and neither acknowledge each other. Toki looks up to compare the street names to his map and orient himself again. 

The glass door into the gas station opens and the stranger steps out again, but he stops and lets the door close behind him. He unwraps the plastic on a pack of cigarettes, smacks it against his palm several times, then lights one. Toki ignores him, but wrinkles his nose against the new addition in the onslaught of smells. 

“You want one?” 

His voice is warm and friendly, so Toki looks up. This guy is tall, and his hair is long and wavy, and his beard reminds Toki of a goat, and there is a bandage over his eye. Toki is too polite to voice his observations. “No thanks you,” he says instead, and looks back down to his map, thinking the interaction is over. Normally, he would be eager to make a friend, but America so far has not been as friendly as he is. 

“That’s a nice guitar you got there, I bet,” says the stranger. The shape of Toki’s case makes it obvious that he’s wielding a Flying V. “Are you in a band?”

Toki shakes his head, his dirty hair brushing his cheekbones. “Ams going to be,” he replies confidently, sitting up a little straighter. “I come from Norway for guitars audition.” 

Something about the man’s face changes in a microscopic way, but it’s too dark for Toki to tell anything for certain. He gets the same feeling his father gave him sometimes, when he had done something wrong but not wrong enough to warrant instant punishment. This was somehow worse, because this meant he would have to wonder to himself for an untold length of time exactly what misstep he had made. 

“For which band,” the shirtless guy grunts, hand over his mouth while he inhales on his cigarette. The end glows bright red, and when he takes it away from his mouth Toki notes that it’s black. It smells a little spicier than tobacco, and he privately thinks to himself that it’s something Runke would enjoy. 

“Ums,” Toki mumbles, made self conscious by this man’s tone and posture. He can’t lie on the spot, but that skittering animal part in his brain that told him to run away is making him anticipate that he is about to give the wrong answer. “Dethklok?”

The guy barks out a laugh with a cloud of clove smoke, and he flicks his cigarette at Toki’s forehead and saunters away back to the car he arrived in. “Good luck, kid,” he yells, halfway in the vehicle. “Hope you got round-trip tickets.” The engine roars as he ducks inside and slams the door, and the car leaves a cloud of smoke in its wake as it screams out of the parking lot. It is also the worst thing Toki has smelled yet. 

He sighs and drags his exhausted body up from this bench. As he walks to find a more private bench, his shoes start to fall apart.

* * *

The next morning, bright and early at sunrise, a police officer wakes Toki with a sharp jab in the ribs. “Get outta here,” he snarls. “You can’t sleep here.” 

Exhausted and sore, hoists his body up and gets it moving, keeping the strap held tight in both hands. By then the police officer has his back turned, walking away down the sidewalk looking for other unauthorized resting. “Excuses me,” Toki calls, figuring the police were there to help people. The officer ignores him, so he shuffles along after him. “Do you know how to get to Tampa? I haves an audition.” 

“Take the bus,” the officer grunts, waving him off and not looking at him. 

Toki moves on, sour at the lack of kindness and sour that he’s been direction toward an option he has already tried. But the bus station happens to be on his way, so he stops in for a look, figuring he has very little left to use. 

The good news, he discovers, is that that there is a connecting ride, and it doesn’t go in a big loop, and it will get him to Tampa in only about five hours with a bunch of transfers. The nice ticket booth man assures him it’s easier than it sounds, and explains the process in a way that helps Toki understand. 

The bad news is that he is two dollars short on the ticket money. The ticket man apologizes and says he’d issue one anyway if he could, but... His sentence trails off, and this is one of the things Toki is old enough to understand. He curses himself for getting burgers and Starbucks and a map and paying for a stranger’s gas. Had he simply not done one of these things - gone a little hungrier, been a little less generous, stolen or tried to find a different map - he would be on his way. 

His feet bleed, and his stomach hurts, and his eyes burn from exhaustion. Everything abruptly catches up with him, grabbing him around the ankles like a monster under the bed. He shuffles around the corner of the station and drops to his ass on the pavement, leaning against the concrete wall and angrily tossing his hat down in front of him. He balls his fists in his hair and does not cry, because he had been trained not to. He knows he could just keep walking, find someone to hitchhike with again, and still get to Tampa as he dreamed. But he wants to stop walking, wants to stop seeing cars whip back into traffic ahead of him, and wants to bawl his eyes out. Instead, he just hisses through his teeth. 

“Yknow, you’d make more money if you pull out that guitar and play it,” a voice above him says. 

Toki looks up miserably, his blue eyes cold. This lady looks not far off from the first one he hitched with, but she’s in a waitress uniform and seems older. The lines in her face make her look kind, and she smiles at him dryly, but in a way that doesn’t feel like he’s being laughed at. 

Wordlessly, he pulls out the V and checks the tuning, quietly apologizing for not having an amp. He strums a few chords weakly, but the woman waits patiently for him to find his footing. He works up to something faster, sliding through portions of songs he guesses might be familiar to her, instead of the black metal wails that Runke showed him. 

She claps softly, then reaches into her purse and drops a dollar bill and a butterscotch candy into his hat. “See? Keep it up and you’ll get where you need to be.” She waves goodbye, and Toki waves back. 

The second dollar takes him longer. He slowly catches on that he must keep playing continuously, instead of when people stop for him. Some hang around a few minutes, and many leave nothing. A few drop other coins into his hat - whatever loose change they have rattling around in their pockets or bags. He thanks each of them, and occasionally stops to recount his change. He thinks it’s strange to have them all different sizes, but the value did not go up by size. The smallest one was worth ten, but the brown, larger coin was only worth one. He thought they were also uglier than kroner, too. 

Eventually, when he stops to count them, they add up to two dollars and twelve cents. Immediately he bolts to his feet and scrambles to the ticket counter, dumping all the money to his name out in front of the teller. He is issued passage by bus to Tampa, and instructions for his transfers, and his twelve cents back in change. When he sinks into the bus seat, patterned with bright squiggly lines and shapes, he sings songs to himself under his breath until exhaustion catches up with him and he dozes off. 

* * *

It’s the napping that gets him, in the end, and he misses a transfer. It brings him only a few miles further north than he needed, but it adds to the distance he must walk to the rehearsal space. He tries to run for some of it, but his shoes were too battered and it made his guitar bang against his back in a way that scared him. 

But, eventually, the building loomed ahead of him. Trailing out of it were men and women, young and old, each with their own guitars in every color and shape. Some of them looked furious, others wept openly as they stumbled away, and still others looked like the photos Toki had seen in Runke’s magazines depicting soldiers traumatized from battle. Toki’s footsteps slowed as he approached, noticing he was the only one heading  _ towards _ the building. 

A man in a denim vest put a hand on his shoulder and nearly made him jump out of his skin. “Give it up, man,” the guy sighed. “It’s impossible. He’s too fast.”

He could hear the guitarist from outside already, and it was the fastest he had ever heard. It put the crispy demo tape recording to shame. It dwindled to a stop gracefully, and Toki felt a sharp pang in his chest. He wanted it to continue, and he felt angry that Runke had ever said this band was not  _ true.  _ It had to be the truest thing he had ever heard. 

In the silence Toki paused, adjusting his cap on his head, and considered what would happen if he were turned away. Stranded in America, with twelve cents to his name and no way to get home - and potentially, no home to be welcomed back to. It sent a cold wave over his body despite the humidity and blazing sunset, and he shoved the thought down inside himself. He raised his dirty hand up and knocked on the metal overhead door. Someone inside, with the deepest voice Toki had ever heard, gave the order to open the door. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> faen det hele = fuck it all


	4. possums in the autumn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dead animals and dead names and dead end roads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a warning for pretty mild and indirect discussion of trans experiences, brief internalized homophobia, and non-graphic descriptions of roadkill.

Pickles pulls his car up close to the roadside and leans to try and see around Murderface as he cranks the passenger window down. The bassist leans his upper body out, then ducks back in and rifles around the empty beer cans on the floorboard to grab their utility flashlight. He fixes the beam on the pile of leaves and trash strewn among the gravel. 

“Aw, it’s just a, I dunno, pants or something,” he sighs, flopping back into the leather seat. The motion sends the beam of the flashlight bouncing wildly around the car’s interior, momentarily blinding Pickles, but William gets it switched off and shoved back under his thigh. As he winds the window back up halfway, the light slips out from under his leg and clanks among the cans all over again.

Rubbing his eyes with one palm, Pickles guides the car back away from the roadside and keeps driving, doing nearly fifteen miles under the speed limit. He fumbles at the volume knob on the stereo, turning it back up again so he and his passenger can fully hear Ozzy wailing on about wizards. “Christ, dude, I thought this was supposed to be like that road,” he complains, ignoring the road ahead as he plucks another joint off the collection on the dashboard and gets it lit. 

“What road?” Murderface asks, staring expectantly at the joint pinched between the knuckles of Pickles’ right hand. 

“Y’know, the one from Pet Sematary,” the drummer explains, his tone indicating Murderface should have known what he meant despite how vague his statement was. “Whatever the name was.” He sucks the rolling paper deeply again, then hands it off. Still holding in smoke, he smacks at Murderface for taking it roughly in his big calloused fingers. 

“Dunno that it even had a name, just a lot of trucks.” He inhales and fails to hold back his cough, doubling over onto his fist, which he then wipes off onto his denim shorts. “Not even any fucking squirrels out here.”

Pickles guides the car around a curve, the headlights glaring against a private property sign bolted to a half-collapsed wire fence. Behind it stood a wall of cypress and moss, making it impossible to see more than a few feet into the trees. Beyond that was nothing but shadow. These parts of Florida always made him feel like he was living in a horror movie; the kind where a group of five guys wanders too deep into the swamp and find themselves heinously devoured by the (possibly

mutant?) hillbillies upon whose property they had unwittingly trespassed. Depending on what drugs he was on while near these gnarls of flora, he either felt an intense and driving need to be anywhere else in the world, or he intimately understood why horror movie protagonists press forward into danger despite all reason and rationality. Risking your life is exciting, after all.

It always felt different from all the pine and hackberry and maple back in Wisconsin - which he had long since trained himself out of referring to as  _ home _ . In Tomahawk he could understand how animals moved through even the most dense forest, and rarely did it ever feel unwelcoming. Here, he couldn’t picture how even squirrels or birds could exist in some of the thick tangles, god forbid a deer or puma coming through. Despite how much the city had colonised the land, the remaining protected acres felt hostile to human presence or interference. These were not the kind of trees you’d see on very many postcards or calendars. Nathan sometimes stared out into the green, saying it was ‘sick’, which may have been how he expressed something was beautiful. Pickles didn’t fully understand where he got that idea. 

As far as Pickles knew, Murderface felt the same way, give or take. He wasn’t sure what the podunk parts of Texas or Arizona were like, but he pictured both of them to be flat brown dirt and cacti for as far as the eye could see, an extreme contrast to tropical, swampy Florida. The band’s bassist seemed to attack unfamiliar settings the way a crashed alien invader would - immediate expression of confidence and control, albeit completely misplaced. Even through the haze of drugs, Pickles could tell that this behavior was a tarp hastily thrown over a mountain of anxiety, but he kept this observation to himself. It wasn’t a hornet’s nest he planned to swing at.

The two of them stare out the windshield with their mouths shut, a Venom song and tires on asphalt the only sound in the darkness. The clock on the dash reads almost four in the morning, but they were both a couple energy drinks deep by now. Murderface scoots his ass to the edge of the leather seat, shoving his boots up onto the dash above the glove compartment. Almost as soon as he gets comfortable, Pickles slaps his scabby knee. “Dude, get that down,” he snaps, looking away from the road but keeping his other hand on the wheel. “Can’t keep an eye on your side of the road sitting like that, anyway.” 

William hisses in faux pain, obeying and crushing a can or two under his feet when he puts them back down. Frustrated with their fruitless search, he worms his fingers into one of the cigarette burns in the seat and stretches it out further, picking out the foam underneath and letting the chunks drop between the seat and the car door. Exhaling thick white smoke from the gap between his teeth, he leans his forehead against the window and tries to get comfortable. “This blows,” he whines, passing the joint back to Pickles. Before he can hand it over, the headlights of another car slide around the next curve toward them. He drops his hand out of view until he’s certain it’s not a police car. “Do you want to just go to The Pit?” 

Reluctant to cave to Murderface’s whining, Pickles wrinkles his nose and makes a drawn out noise, trying to come to a decision. “Yeah,” he decides finally. “Haven’t seen anything since... whatever that was when we started.”

Earlier, when it was still in the PM hours, Murderface had shouted that he saw something, and Pickles slammed on the brakes. Before the car even stopped, Murderface had leapt from the vehicle and stumbled towards the smear on the road’s white line, only for his shoulders to sink dejectedly as soon as he skidded to a halt. Whatever animal this had been, it was impossible to tell - which defeated the whole purpose of their search. They had pressed on, but hours later and their attention spans were circling the drain. This was not work to be done in the daylight, but the sun would be rising soon. 

Their minds made up, Pickles puts more weight on the gas pedal and lets his attention focus on the road head instead of whatever litter decorates the sidelines. Murderface jigs one leg up and down rapidly, picking at the skin around his fingernails. There’s a brief stretch of pure silence as one side of the hand-recorded cassette tape runs out of material, before Pickles finally notices and switches it over to side B. 

“I’m gonna break a rule,” William announces, shoving the tip of an index finger in his mouth and gnawing at a hangnail. 

Pickles makes a short noise of dread, looking at his bassist from the corner of his eye. He’s noticed that this guy is nearly incapable of allowing silence to go uninterrupted for more than ten minutes. It grates against his nerves, sometimes, that William was so uncomfortable with sitting in relative quiet. Other times he was thankful - William talking meant that Pickles no longer had to be alone with his own thoughts. As much as he appreciated a brief pause in how rapidfire the stimulus seemed to be when around his band, he never wanted to let his mind wander into itself too far. Thinking too hard was a much more efficient way of putting him in a bad mood than anything else in the world. 

“What rule,” Pickles grits apprehensively. There weren’t very many social rules established in Mordhaus, and most of them centered around not eating, drinking, snorting, smoking, injecting or otherwise inserting someone else’s property into one’s own body without permission. The rest of the rules were personal, and often treated as grand law of the land - or forgotten entirely after no more than fifteen minutes. None were written down, and any remembered were only so by virtue of the volume at which they were shouted (or in Nathan’s case, deathgrowled). 

Murderface’s gapped teeth click together as he continues gnawing on his nails, unable to get the angle he needs to detach the last sliver. He chooses not to directly answer Pickles’ question, instead opting to plow forward regardless of the drummer’s input. “Why does everybody call you Pickles?” As soon as the words exit his mouth and fall dead to the car’s floorboards, Murderface clenches his teeth in anticipation of being swung at for overstepping. Not that he could help himself from doing so, though, especially considering he had once even heard Pickles’ mother wailing the name at him over the phone. If someone’s own mother called them something, either it’s their real name, for real (and who would carry a child for nine months only to bestow the name  _ Pickles _ upon the fruit of their loins), or it was an adorable childhood nickname that stuck too strongly (and who would be so endeared to what their mother called them that they used it in their professional career in metal). 

No sharp little drummer knuckles sink into the soft part of Murderface’s bicep. Instead, Pickles sucks his teeth audibly, inhales, adjusts just grip on the steering wheel, ashes his joint, glances out the driver’s side window, sniffs, grunts, sighs, and finally speaks. “Well, why do they call you Murderface?”

Either oblivious to or unwilling to admit the ridiculousness of his own name, William knits his eyebrows together over his broad forehead. “Because... It’s my name?” he replies, leaning forward and groping around in the empty cans and plastic bags to see if there’s an unopened can remaining to help himself to. The only container with liquid in it turns out to be a plastic soda bottle, with half mysterious liquid and half cigarette ashes. 

“And it fits,” Pickles grins, propping a kneecap up to the steering wheel to keep the car steady while he lights another joint. 

William doesn’t acknowledge the remark, too tired of hearing that specific joke to even register that it was uttered once more. “But Pickles isn’t your real name.” 

Joint successfully alight and bobbing between his lips, Pickles snickers and shakes his head. “You’d have to be off your shits to name somebody Pickles,” he agrees. “It’s not my real name, but you know what Magnus said. D’you want him to have another conniption fit, dude?”

Eyes once again on the joint, Murderface crosses his scarred across his threadbare t-shirt. “I don’t see him here, and I’m not gonna snitch on myself. What’s your real name?” He presses on, the protests only enticing him further. He assumes Pickles’ real name must be something embarrassing if it was something he’d be this dodgy about. He runs through a list of guesses in his head, ready to rattle them out at the earliest opportunity. Eugene, Ferdinand, Fauntleroy... Proinsias? He was Irish, after all.

“I know you’re not gonna snitch on yourself, you dipshit,” the drummer mutters under his breath, smacking his palm to his forehead and sprinkling ash on his jeans. He finally passes the joint to his passenger, if only to make dusting the ash off easier. He inhales deeply, loading an argument into the chamber, but decides it’s not worth it. William Murderface could wheedle with the best of them, and he wasn’t up for dealing with it tonight. May as well concede defeat instead of wasting more time than they already had. “Alright, listen - I’ll tell you, but you better not open your fat mouth to anybody else, you got that?” He punctuates with a wag of his finger at Murderface’s broad nose like he’s an untrained puppy.

Wide eyed and delighted to have won, the bassist nods eagerly, crossing himself Catholic-style, but in the wrong order. He finishes by offering out his stout, calloused hand for a shake. “Promise.”

Pickles shakes his hand, grateful that it’s not the one he’s been gnawing on for the past six songs. He takes his attention away from the road long enough to look seriously into Murderface’s eyes for a long pause. Then, satisfied that they are both equally sincere, he faces forward again, both hands on the wheel. 

“I chose Dillon, because Bob Dylan, but I changed the spelling.” As he speaks, he digs a thumbnail into the faux leather wheel wrap. He has no idea what Murderface’s opinion of the voice of protest was, but felt the compulsive need to defend himself. “Dylan was kind of one of the only things I was allowed to listen to for a while, so.” He scratches at his temple, careful to keep the burning end of the joint away from his hair. “But, uh, mom n’ dad didn’t really wanna call me that.” 

Where he expects a stupid bruise-poking joke to be made, instead Murderface just blinks in silence, his sharp eyebrows creasing in the way they do when he’s focused intensely on something he’s trying to understand. Usually the expression is reserved for low budget documentaries about conspiracy theories, and Pickles isn’t used to it being aimed in his direction. 

“Why the fuck not? It’s your name,” the bassist asks, and Pickles is not sure sometimes if he pities or envies Murderface. He wishes denial of identity was something that had never even occurred to him as a possibility, but instead it was a familiar form of disrespect he had been subjected to as long as he could jigsaw his memories back together. The idea that it could be so foreign an experience to someone else was disturbing, like finding out they had ever heard of Metallica, or had never seen Star Wars - having to defend his own identity was so ingrained that imagining life without it felt like science fiction. May as well picture everyone with blue skin and four eyes while he’s at it. Murderface had enough space on his forehead for a few extras, at least. 

Another deep breath before he responds, Pickles sucks air through his teeth and debates how far into it he wants to go. He knows Murderface  _ knows _ , but Murderface only knows because Skwisgaar figures him out within a few hours of their first meeting. It had been an honest mistake, but it wasn’t the way he’d have chosen for things to go. These were cards he preferred to play close to his chest until late in the game, and the disruption of his plans meant that the whole discussion was curt. Rules were established and that was that. 

But these weren’t the rules Murderface was breaking, exactly; this was a breach of one established by Magnus. No personal questions. No inquiry about ages, birthdays, histories, political opinions... Anything of the sort. Magnus wanted everything  _ professional _ , which Pickles thought was awfully big talk for a man who kept breaking his coke nail and supergluing on a single drugstore acrylic instead. He assumed this was more about emotional distance for self-preservation, rather than desiring professional behavior out of a group of stoned twenty-somethings (only half of which possessed a high school diploma - and William’s barely counted). If you keep your distance, you won’t get attached, and if the band were to suffer an eviction of a member, the fallout wouldn’t be as radioactive. Trouble was, the nature of human beings was to make connections. The nature of William Murderface was to let his words flow into the world unimpeded by things such as filters, social conventions, or second thoughts. 

Which Pickles appreciates, he thinks. Whatever thought Murderface has pops out his mouth the second after it sparks in his brain. While a good number of his statements were heinous, none of them had been intolerable. Sometimes baffling, sometimes amusing, sure - but never on par with what his family had said, or what people had screamed at him on the street when he was younger and didn’t pass as well. In his experience, malice and ignorance were siblings, but in the bassist’s brain they were strangers.

May as well break rules right alongside him, then. “Well, they weren’t really supportive of me... y'know,” he says, taking his hands off the wheel to gesture at himself, on one level at his body and at another, his being. Toeing around the exact terminology was his own emotional barrier. Avoiding the direct addressment meant safety; plausible deniability, putting the onus onto the listener to figure out the meaning and react from there. “They just didn’t get it, they didn’t want me doin’ this to myself.”

“But that stuff’s not like being gay,” Murderface responds, blessedly unphased and showing no sign of disapproval. “It’s not a choice.” 

Pickles decides that what he feels for this guy is absolutely pity. There’s a whole can of big fat nightcrawlers here, one that he doesn’t have the time or energy to open at the moment. He’ll prod that bruise at a later date, when William chooses to expose his own traumas instead of nosing around in Pickles’. For now, he takes that comment in stride and moves along. “Some people just don’t get it, dude,” he mutters, gripping the wheel and feeling bile churn up in his stomach. If he thinks about it too hard, he’ll be trapped in this car for two hours, verbally hemorrhaging his frustrations with his family for the nth time. He wants to move on. He wants to have a good time driving around in search of roadkill. He doesn’t want to subject his bandmate to another tirade like this. 

“Yeah,” Murderface agrees, understanding even if he cannot relate in nearly the same way. “But... Why Pickles? What’s that got to do with—“

“Because I wanted to eat nothin’ but pickles when I was a kid, okay,” Pickles snaps, and immediately wishes he had dialed back exactly how snappy it was. “I ate ‘em all the time, on nearly everything, and my mom would bribe me with those big bowling alley guys.” 

“Huh,” says Murderface, rendered speechless by a response he doesn’t expect. The nickname is much less twee and more mundane than anything. He nods in acceptance, and turns his attention back out of the passenger window. “Those big bowling alley guys  _ are _ really good.” Not that he’d ever had one from a bowling alley specifically, but he’d at least had the fortune of eating an enormous pickle before. The vinegar always made his mouth hurt about halfway through them, but in a way he enjoyed.

“And I stole my dad’s booze because my brother burned down the garage and blamed me for it,” Pickles regurgitates, the same way he occasionally found himself spontaneously vomiting into his own mouth after he’d thought his hangover was fully evicted from his system. He even coughs afterward, unsure how to finish the thought or where to go from its end. 

“...Huh,” Murderface says again, this time with his eyebrows raised. He matches Pickles in uncertainty, but takes a drag off their joint and hands it over. “You should do arson for real. I burned up

my school bus one time, and blam. Kicked out of school, moved to Florida, here I am.” 

Pickles licks his lips and swallows, accepting the joint back but dawdling in actually making any use of it. He expected his own pity mirrored back to him, but is relieved by its absence and with how easily William absorbs his statement, the way only someone sitting atop their own mountain of family baggage could. It was much better than being doted on or interrogated with the same expression one wears when watching Springer. He had no problem spectating the disasters of others on TV, but he preferred to remain the audience member instead of the guest. “Nathan told me about you doin’ that,” he says, guiding the car into the parking lot of a dingy gas station. “I always thought you made that shit up.”

Proudly crossing his arms over his chest, Murderface shakes his head and grins slyly. “Nope, all real, baby,” he brags, chest puffed out. He slumps back after a moment. “But nobody died, though.”

“That’s a shame,” Pickles nodded in agreement.

The trees become more sparse, and between them they can pick out the sides of trailers and glimpses of trucks or barbeque grills. Some of the trailers had their lights on inside already. Murderface looks anywhere except at the trailer park, especially as the sign comes up. Pickles knows there’s an easy jab to be made here, or to ask what Stella has been up to, but he figures now isn’t a good time to rib on him about his family. It wouldn’t be fair.

After the trailer park is a tiny two-pump gas station, and Pickles turns the car into the gravel parking lot. He parks cockeyed next to a sign reading  _ lowest price cigarettes _ , and leaves the car running while he goes inside to take them up on that advertisement. Murderface takes the time to empty out the floorboards, fumbling the numerous cans in his arms but managing to get them all in the nearby trash can after two trips. He meets Pickles on the way back out, and the drummer has a plastic bag dangling from one wrist. They get back in the car together and Pickles disperses the bag’s contents, keeping the cigarettes for himself and giving half the candy to Murderface. The rest he deposits in the back seat. As they inhale their snacks, Pickles nearly rear-ends a dumpster backing out of the parking lot. 

Back on their way, Pickles takes them toward their apartment building. The trees fully disperse and Tampa explodes into view, full of street signs and theme parks and country clubs and highways. They stay careful to keep their hands out of view of anything that looks like a police car, but a few white sedans trip them up. They pass what Nathan has lovingly dubbed Mordhaus, then a church, then under a huge looping concrete highway clover, and then just as suddenly they’re on a barely-paved road heading back into more cypress and Spanish moss. At the end of the pavement, the road turns back to dirt, and eventually even that runs out once they’re out of view of civilization. 

Here, Pickles parks the car again. He flicks the headlights off, then back on, then decides it’s bright enough without them and turns them back off. They both unload themselves, slamming the doors shut and walking straight ahead towards a pile of dirt and gravel, trampled down solid by their own visits and the visits of deadbeats before them. Near the edge sits an abandoned sofa, floral patterned originally but now with the additions of spray paint, rain, and beer. Remains of other furniture flank it, battered by humans and age alike. In front of the sofa is a concrete downward slope, and at the bottom are hundreds of beer bottles and cans, flat tires, more furniture, shoes, and other refuse. It’s an old ditch, dried up and out of use, the sides piebald with patches of lighter grey from when the city still tried to cover up the graffiti. More faded tags cover these, but less so now that the trash prevented any stable footing. From there it had earned its moniker,  _ The Pit _ .

Murderface, the only Dethklok member to have been to the bottom of this incline and bearing the ugly scars to prove it, keeps his distance from the edge. He flops himself down onto the couch. Pickles stands at the arm beside him, cracking open one of the sodas he bought with one hand. He deposits the other into the bassist’s lap. 

“Doesn’t smell like anything’s died out here lately,” William says, wiggling the pop tab back and forth. It snaps off and he immediately drops it into his drink, punctuating this with a curse. “What are we gonna do?”

“I dunno,” Pickles signs, wandering off along the ridge and toeing through some of the more resilient foliage. “Guess we could just see when Halloween shit goes for sale?” 

“But that  _ sucks _ ,” Murderface yowls back from his seat. He kicks his boot out in the dirt, sending a collection of little rocks and dust tumbling down to skitter among a disintegrated cardboard box. “It’s not the same, that stuff never looks right.” 

The drummer agrees, but ignores him, pacing around idly at the crest of the hill with his gaze at the dirt. Gum wrappers, cigarette butts, spent lighters, can tabs, bottle caps and even one tied-off condom. Nothing worthwhile, nothing he’d want to bring home, let alone touch. He wondered who was out here fucking on a dumped couch, soaked in rainwater and likely housing raccoons. It’s the kind of sex that isn’t any good, the kind you have when you’re bored and you’ve milked Tampa for all the entertainment you can afford, and you’ve run out of shit to talk about and whatever you were buzzed on was either wearing off or finally starting to get to you. Bad sex in a terrible location was good in its own right, though, if only for the story. 

Pickles takes a long draw on his soda, staring off into the middle distance over the aluminum curve of the can. The sun was starting to rise, but Florida was determined to have another cloudy day. Made antsy by how increasingly gloomy they had become, he shuffles his tennis shoe into the dirt and sends a rock flying, leaving a divot behind. “One time before I dropped outta school, this guy I knew wanted to y’know, screw around, but he didn’t have a condom, just a rubber glove.”

“Ew,”’Murderface grunts, with no conviction to it. However disgusted he acted, he always paid rapt attention to the stories Pickles told. Often they left him snickering uncontrollably. “Did you let him do it?”

Pickles adjusts his grip on his soda can, pulling his arm back and winging it down the slope as far as he could. It hits a mangled bicycle and bounces, spraying the rest of his drink across a pile of dirty trash bags. It clunks against a hubcap, then disappears into the pit. “Dude, no way,” he shakes his head, turning and walking back to the couch with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He climbs onto the couch seat beside his bandmate, one shoe disappearing momentarily between the couch cushions as he hauls himself up to perch his ass on the back rest, elbows on his knees. 

Murderface does not laugh where Pickles knows he normally would have. There’s a brief internal flinch from his failed effort to bring the mood up, but he chooses to blame that on the frustration of their fruitless search. They share silence after that, neither having something appropriately gross to follow up with this time, and neither of them feeling like saying much of anything, anyway. They each smoke two cigarettes down to the filters. 

As he pulls out a third, Murderface pauses. “Hey, uh,” he begins the same way he usually begins the bullshit trains of thought he actually realizes are stupid before he blurts them out. “What is it like? You know what I mean.” It’s his own method of indirectness; while he’s dumb enough to ask, he’s smart enough to know that it’s a dumb question, and if he phrased it vaguely then he has plausible deniability if it isn’t well received. 

Pickles knows exactly what he means, but after nearly six hours of sacrificing sleep in search of roadkill and not even a fly to show for it, he’s not up for the game. “What is what like,” he grunts, flicking his latest spent cigarette butt down the embankment to join thousands of its cousins. “Gotta tell me what you mean, dude.”

Caught, William fumbles his soda and gets the last of it all over the collar of his shirt. He drops the can to the ground and fans his shirt, trying to dry it out and take advantage of the distraction. Stalling for time, he surrenders on his shirt and boots his can into The Pit. It nearly makes it to the other side, half swallowed by some kind of sprawling vine, but it falls back down into the rest of the waste. He conjures up false confidence, hoping Pickles won’t notice his struggle. “To be  _ trans _ , Pickles, jeezy. What did you think I meant, to be  _ ginger _ ? Who cares.” 

Pickles rubs the ball of his thumb between his eyes, all too aware of how early in the morning it is. He wishes he were back in bed. “I know what you meant, douchebag, shut up,” he hisses, hunching his shoulders. He opens his mouth to speak, and pauses, unsure what flavor of answer to supply. Most anyone else would get a deflection - a joke, or the question turned back around on them, or a  _ fuck off _ . The dilemma is, however clumsily he had phrased it, Murderface was asking genuinely. Pickles had halfway paid attention to a documentary Murderface watched about the transition process, back when they still had a neighbor in the apartment next to them to steal cable from, so he knew the bassist was aware of how it worked. He can feel the guy’s eyes on him, waiting expectantly for a response. He almost wants to deck Murderdace for it. “Well. It’s different for everybody , yknow—“

“I’m not askin’ about  _ everybody _ , I’m askin’ about  _ you _ ,” William cuts him off, crossing his arms seriously over his chest as if he weren’t wiry and brittle-looking, with his cheekbones and wrists jutting against his skin. Pickles hopes he’d fill out soon, now that they were pulling in more money and not living off of food banks and gas station snack theft. It’s ten times worse that he’s asking a personal question, though, and Pickles circles back to wanting to punch him, to the point that he balls up one fist preemptively. This was definitely breaking that rule Magnus had implemented. This went past professional and buried itself pretty deep into personal, as an expression of genuine interest in a bandmate’s life. Half of his mind sinks to the ground, knowing that if this progresses it would be a repeat of Snakes N’ Barrels. Arguments, bad times, messy departures, not seeing each other again. The other half twists into knots, hating the focus on himself and hating that it was one of the first times since he left Tomahawk that someone had asked into him like this. 

Abruptly he stands up, his sneakers sliding in the gravel before he gains his footing. His ass hurts from the eroded back of the couch, and he’s hungry, and he’s tired, and he doesn’t know how to answer the question. Pickles turns away from Murderface, but he can still feel eyes on his back and he knows exactly what expression the guy is wearing. Every answer he can come up with is the wrong one. It’s too esoteric, too dramatic, too dumbed down, too unrelatable, too relatable, too vague, too specific. He scratches at the base of one of his newly formed dreads, squeezing his eyes shut tight and his jaw clenched. It doesn’t make the answer come any easier. 

Feeling awkward, Murderface also stands, uncertain what to do with his body. His hands go into his pockets, then out, then cross over his chest. He wants to ask if Pickles is okay, or to tell him nevermind, but he does nothing but stand in silence. 

Pickles turns and walks back towards the car, head aimed down at his shoes kicking through the dust. He hears Murderface following almond behind him just as slowly, in no hurry to go back home. 

“It’s like arguing,” he says finally. “You’re always arguin’ with somebody. They think they know you better than you do, or you don’t belong somewhere, or saying you can’t do something, you gotta do this...” He trails off, pumping his own brakes before he gets the chance to get going. He knows if he gets going, he won’t stop, and they’ll be sitting in the car as the sun climbs, both of them in foul moods and maybe too tired to drive back home. Instead he just shakes his head at himself, rubbing his calloused palm into his forehead as he wrenches open the car door and dumps his body inside. 

He only looks up when he doesn’t hear Murderface react to his statement, and the passenger door doesn’t open. The bassist is instead standing there, hand on the car door, staring vacantly into the weeds with his mouth open. Pickles watches as his brain catches up with his eyes, and his smashed-looking face lights up in excitement and relief. He smacks his hand on the passenger window to get the attention from the drummer he already has, and shakes a pointed finger in the direction of the weeds, hollering “Get back out here!” 

Pickles scrambles back out, picking his way through the tall grass as Murderface crashes a path through ahead of him. He nearly collides when Murderface stops abruptly and crouches with his hands on his knees. Peering around him at the ground, Pickles lets out a stupid barking yell, no words to it, just surprise and elation. 

In the grass is the half-eaten corpse of some little animal. Flies swirl around it, not seeming to get much nutrition from what dried flesh remains. Crows have been picking at it, but a few little tufts of greyish fur twitch in the slight breeze. The jaws lay open, leaving sharp white teeth in stark contrast to the rot. Some smell lingers, but it’s not the worst they’ve encountered. Pickles immediately runs back to the car, stumbling over himself on the way. He gets the trunk open, pulling out numerous plastic shopping bags. On the way back, he sees Murderface is already trying to pry it from the dirt with a stick. 

“Dude, how did you even see this?” Pickles shakes one of the bags out, and Murderface sticks his hand into it to use as a makeshift glove. Pickles gets another one ready for him, and he plucks corpse bits out of the earth and deposits them in. 

“I saw a couple crows over here,” he says, gesturing at the spot. “All of em in one spot.” 

_ How lucky _ , Pickles thinks.  _ A distraction from their conversation, and what they were out looking for to begin with _ . Once William’s done excavating, Pickles wraps the corpse bag up and places it inside the bag he had been using like a glove. Both bags go inside another, and another, and another, and the last one gets tied off. Nothing will shake loose in the trunk of the car, and it does a good job of holding in the smell. “Well, good goin’, big guy,” he nods, clapping him on the back. They both stand and return to the car, tucking the bones away in the center of the spare tire. “What d’you think it is?”

“A raccoon, I guess? Or a possum, the face was a little long.” As he gets back in the car, he clips the side of his head on the roof of the vehicle and lets out a short yelp, though he seems unhurt. “Anyway. What were you sayin’ about arguing?”

Pickles pauses in the middle of buckling his seatbelt. It figures this would be the one time William Murderface actually remembers where a conversation was going. He’s more than ready for it to be over, but doesn’t want Murderface to feel snapped at - the guy really could act like a kicked puppy sometimes. Not that he wasn’t above snapping at him, but even he could admit that occasionally it wasn’t actually justified. This time was pretty dubious. “Uh. Y’know,” he shrugs vaguely, twisting in his seat to see out the back window so he could reverse back the way they’d come. “Gotta argue all the time.” 

Murderface crosses his arms over his chest, ankles crossed in the floor of the car, performative nonchalance. “You don’t argue with us a whole lot,” he points out. “Except Magnus, but—“

“Hey, I don’t start that,” Pickles interjects. “Most of the time.”

“Yeah, I mean,  _ sometimes _ , but—“

“But that’s just sometimes, dude, it doesn’t count,” he insists, getting the car angled back onto the road and putting them on the track back to Mordhaus. The tape player makes a terrible screeching sound, but stops and resumes the music properly once Pickles smacks his palm onto the deck. “It’s different than what I mean, anyway. You guys are.... You guys are alright. Sometimes.”

“Oh, Pickles,” Murderface sighs, hand to his heart. “That really touches me, right here.” As much sarcasm his statement hemorrhages, he still understands what Pickles means, and privately is pleased to hear that he’s considered a friend. The five of them rarely make direct reference to any kind of attachment, especially with how Magnus feels about it. He doesn’t like to directly point it out himself very much either. The last thing he wants is to overextend his connection and make things weird. 

“I’ll leave you on the side of the road,” says Pickles, who wouldn’t dare. Dethklok as a musical entity satisfied him more than his last band, and felt much different. Tension was inescapable, but it’s not like he could drive around with Tony at four in the morning looking for roadkill or talk with Sammy like he did with Nathan. Even if Magnus made the odd sideways comment, it was an improvement. He’s afraid that the other, longer F bomb on this would collapse what they’ve all carefully constructed - in some ways, he almost agrees with Magnus’ insistence on keeping emotional distance from one another. Other times, he couldn’t help but consider this latest collection of idiots to be his best (and sometimes, first) friends.

He says nothing, though, and they pull up to their shared apartment as their neighbors leave for work, which guarantees them a decent parking spot for once. 

Pickles doesn’t expect anyone to be awake, but as he and Murderface cross the living room into the kitchen, he hears someone’s bedroom door click shut. 

“ _ Eugh, _ that smell,” Skwisgaar groans, emerging from the darkened hallway and pinching his chiseled nose. “Murderface, haves you not been to bathing again?” 

The two of them stop, Murderface almost losing his grip on the bundle of plastic bags. “No! Fuck you, it’s a possum,” he snaps back. Now in such an enclosed space, the plastic doesn’t do much to mask the smell, and Pickles rushes him outside onto their tiny back balcony. 

Between a plastic bucket and a metal folding chair, there’s barely enough room for one of them to stand, so the two of them awkwardly knock elbows into one another. With some effort, Pickles gets the lid off the bucket, nearly losing some of the water it’s been filled with. As Skiwsgaar peers around them, Murderface peels away the layers of plastic bags, dropping them off the railing to float down into the dumpster directly below. At the last layers, with the stiff animal exposed to the air, he dumps it swiftly into the water. Pickles snaps the lid back on and nudges the bucket back into the corner. 

“Disgustinks,” Skwisgaar sneers, retreating back into the kitchen. “You leaves that how long?” 

“Until all the flesh falls off,” Murderface informs him proudly. “A week or two. It’s called  _ maceration _ .” 

Pickles, busy scrubbing all the way up to his elbows with dish soap, knows what’s going to happen the second the words exit Murderface’s mouth. 

Skwisgaar recoils in horror, lips pulled back over his perfect white teeth. “Didn’ts ask to know what you ams doing to your dick!” 

Weaving through the ensuing argument over the terminology used for jerking off versus cleaning corpses, Pickles grabs Murderface by the back of the shirt and shoves him to the sink. He doesn’t release him until his hands are scrubbed and rinsed, but in the time that takes, the bassist and lead guitar are still bickering. He sighs, nudging Skwisgaar out. “Look, Skwis, dude, Nathan wants a skull for our shows, so we gotta do this.” He prays to himself that Skwisgaar won’t be around when it comes time to dump out the bucket. “Just don’t mess with it and it’ll be fine.” 

The Swede mumbles in his native language, peering warily out the back door as if the animal is going to release itself and skitter back into the apartment. He shudders visibly, but seems more satisfied once Murderface dries his hands and closes the door. “Will look good on mic stands,” he concedes, nodding. “I makes breaksfast if Murderface showers.” 

Pickles, who wants nothing more than to go to bed, nods. “I’ll do pancakes if you do eggs,” he agrees, deciding not to mention that eggs are the only thing he really trusts Skwisgaar to do. The guy wasn’t a danger in the kitchen, but he wasn’t exactly brimming with talent. “After that I ain’t doin’ anything the rest of the day.” 

Skwisgaar nods, finding these terms agreeable. Murderface shuffles away to the bathroom, already shedding his vest. He nearly collides with Nathan as he exits his bedroom, rubbing a fist in his eyes blearily. He greets the remainder of his band with a barely-functional grunt. 

“Good morning to you too.” Pickles gestures at the back door with the bag of flour. “We got you a possum out at the Pit.” 

Nathan brightens up right away, and it takes both Skwisgaar and Pickles to fend him away from the balcony for a sneak peek. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for how long that took. huge thanks to everyone who’s been interested so far! i don’t always reply but your comments mean a lot to me <3
> 
> also, i don’t recommend maceration. especially not on your apartment balcony.


End file.
